Episode 17: Gary Dann

Gary Dann built The Boom Room, where most of Bub & Pop gets recorded, under the El. We talk about the Craigslist jam that put him behind the drums for Digable Planets, Music Church, and Papa’s Ginger Seltzer. And since we taped, the zoning board has approved the Boom Room to host live events!

Bub & Pop | Episode 17: Gary Dann (recorded June 2, 2026)

Most of this show gets recorded at The Boom Room, Gary Dann’s rehearsal and recording space, so we knew it was just a matter of time before we’d turn the cameras around and catch up with him. Gary started the Boom Room under the El on Front Street in 2010, when Fishtown was still the Wild West. One of the guys living there told him flat out you can’t build a studio with the El going by – as it turns out, the first band he ever recorded there picked up the train during a quiet moment in a recording session and loved the way it came out! (That was ages ago – the place is much better adorned now!)

In some ways, this conversation has been in the works since the mid-80s, when Gary and I were kindergarten classmates. Many years later, the path to the Boom Room ran through Craigslist and a fortuitous introduction to Doodlebug, who went on to spend years making music with Gary and hired him to tour the world behind the kit with Digable Planets.

Back in Fishtown, he ran Music Church: door unlocked, sometimes propped open, rappers and singers and sax players walking in off the street. The trick was refusing to let it be a jam session: singers got eight bars, then the sax player got eight bars, then everybody switched keys, and twenty strangers would come out the other end with an actual song, credits split with whoever was in the room that night. (Some of those singers play with Gary in Worldtown Soundsystem now.) We also talked about some early milestones, including when the late Billy Paul took over the whole room for a week to rehearse Prince songs, as well as when Gary worked on a project with string arrangements by Larry Gold.

Then the ginger: a new baby, a pandemic, a SodaStream, a recipe tested on his bandmates (“needs more lemon, dude”), and a powerhouse of a canning machine. Today, it’s Papa’s Ginger Seltzer – real ginger, real turmeric, no sugar, no stevia. When we taped he’d just signed a lease for kitchen space in South Philly, and in August Papa’s announced its new production space with room to make a lot more cans.

An audio-first version of this podcast is available here.

Gary Dann | Website | Instagram

Also mentioned: Worldtown Soundsystem | Instagram | Facebook | YouTube | Spotify

Also mentioned: Papa’s Ginger Seltzer | Instagram

Host: Matt Hoffman | Producer: Tedd Kanakaris | Location: The Boom Room