Leg Warmers Reheated

Collection Contents

#		Title	Length
1		China Too	4:41	Play
2		People Who Talk in Elevators	4:23	Play
3		Hotprint (The Old Input-Output)	5:58	Play
4		Bound & Gagged (preview mix)	6:56	Play
5		Vain for Fun (live)	10:23	Play
6		Sick of these Pegs (live)	8:15	Play
7		Is it So Hard for You? (live)	3:02	Play
8		Puppy-Wave Radio (live)	3:28	Play
9		Cocktails on the Tundra (instrumental mix)	5:08	Play
10		CONDUIT 1: Night Water Raft	4:41	Play
11		CONDUIT 2: Glass Passage	4:20	Play
12		CONDUIT 3: Treat	1:18	Play
13		CONDUIT 4: Andreas' Fault I	3:07	Play
14		CONDUIT 5: Waterwheels	1:34	Play
15		CONDUIT 6: Andreas' Fault II	0:51	Play
16		CONDUIT 7: Morning Sadhana	2:13	Play
17		CONDUIT 8: Pipers' Procession	5:48	Play
18		CONDUIT 9: Constructors' Rally	0:46	Play
19		CONDUIT 10: A Frenzy of Carpentry	2:08	Play

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Description

Described by Outmusic's Jon Gilbert Leavitt as "the wackiest electronic duo since the Flying Lizards", and by Deian McBryde as "a cross between Devo and the Captain and Tenille" (!), Rubberlegs like to think of themselves as midwives in the process of birthing waveforms. Though they will always be three musically codependent friends, in many lifetimes of group therapy, Rubberlegs have recently reinvented themselves as performers. Coming out of the studio at last, thanks to Estrogen (Carol Kassel and Corinne Curcio) and the wonderful Outmusic family, Bunny and Gordon dedicated their first-ever live performance to their dear departed partner Bob. They were thrilled when China Too and People Who Talk in Elevators made it into the Top 5 on MP3.com's New Wave chart, and they hope Bob is listening as they bring these and other songs out for people to hear at last.

The first incarnation of the band began in 1982, when Bob and Gordon were living on Avenue B in New York's East Village. At the urging of his new husband Bob, Gordon had just left the new wave powerpop band The Privates, after three and a half years of playing bars, debuting at CBGB and headlining at nearby metal club Great Gildersleeves. Bob had bought his first synth, the Memorymoog, and was starting to make some crazy sounds of his own. The two of them collaborated briefly with Staten Island singer/songwriter Susan Greenwood, and then decided to pursue their own musical connection. At that time, Bunny (known then simply as Thomas) was starting to get interested, having shared the same love for electronic and new wave dance tunes, and he started sitting in as a "sound person", doing the mixing and playing around with the sound processing gear.

The first fruitful days of this collaboration came in the summer of 1984, when Bob, Gordon and Bunny spent long weekends in their short-term Tribeca loft, writing, rehearsing and jamming together. Bunny would leave his Williamsburg apartment at 7 A.M., an unheard-of early time for him, stop at D'Aiuto to purchase a chocolate mousse cake, and bring it down to the loft. We would make a strong pot of french roast coffee, turn on the synths and sound system, and let the music begin. At that time we had one song that we could play live, Vain for Fun (a recording of which can be found on our retrospective CD, Leg Warmers Reheated), and we rehearsed it constantly. We didn't yet have any multitrack recording capability, but at Bunny's insistence, everything we played was captured to stereo cassette, whether it was rehearsal, jamming or the working out of new ideas and songs. As a result, we have a priceless collection of first-generation tapes that contains all kinds of magical moments, many of which are documented on our CD. Sick of these Pegs and Puppy-Wave Radio are both from this period. They were created spontaneously, and they exemplify the twisted experimental spirit that animated us in those days.

The name Rubberlegs was chosen a couple of years later, when Bob and Gordon were living in their Avenue B apartment again, and we had assembled our first little MIDI recording studio in the tiny living room. We started using Dr. T software on the Commodore 64 to sequence our songs, and the ADAP Soundrack on the Atari ST as our first sampler. Bunny and Gordon look back at this as one of our best periods. Hotprint and Cocktails on the Tundra were recorded then, as was the improvised ambient suite Conduit. We assembled our own library of custom-made samples, dragging a microphone around the apartment and recording things like the toilet flushing, teeth brushing, pipes being banged on, corning casserole dishes being smacked into each other, saucers spinning, a wine glass clanging, etc. We had a blast doing this, and it led to the creation of our first bathroom percussion kit. The first use of this kit was in Water Closet Ballet, one of a series of telephone answering machine messages that we created under the name Fonewave. The germs of Angelic Flush and 'Throominations were created during this period, as improvisations using the toilet flush, shower, electric shaver, toothbrush, sink rinse, spit and hair dryer sounds. These pieces would later resurface under Bunny and Gordon's techno project, Whirr & Click.

1990 began a very bleak decade for Rubberlegs. Bob and Gordon bought a country house with a friend, in upstate New York, and started spending weekends up there. We eventually moved the studio up there, but the music-making concept never gelled in the distracting country environment. Bunny went through changes of his own, as Bob and Gordon spent time in the trees, shaking the stresses of city life. In 1994, Bob left work after suddenly coming down with AIDS-related illnesses, and Gordon took care of him for nine months in their East 89th St. apartment. Bob finally passed away in May 1995. Gordon, distraught to have lost his beloved partner of fourteen years, continued spending time up in the country, got into some crazy inappropriate relationships and even made a little music, buying some new equipment and experimenting half-heartedly with it. Finally, in 1999, he reached the end of his rope and sold the country house, moving everything back to the city. A few months later, at the beginning of 2000, he reached the other end of his rope and quit his Wall Street computer-programming job. Disgusted with corporate life and the fallout from two big mergers, he took the rest of the year off, regrouping and focusing full-time on music for the first time ever. Bunny was eager to get reinvolved, so the two of them got together to assemble the newest version of our MIDI studio, using the fabulous Emagic Logic for Windows and the Kurzweil K2500 sampler, and finished a song of Gordon's from the '80s, Bound and Gagged. A demo "preview" mix of this recording is on our CD.

We were introduced to MP3.com by a musician friend, and posted our best material to the site at http://www.mp3.com/rubberlegs. This became a wonderfully cathartic project, the process of putting together the bio, track list and song descriptions, and along with the CD, it stands as a fitting memorial and tribute to Bob. In May 2000, we had the added thrill of seeing our electropop songs China Too and People Who Talk in Elevators rise to the Top 5 on MP3.com's New Wave chart. We even made a few hundred dollars from people downloading and playing the songs. We are very sad that MP3.com has recently shut down.

Bunny and Gordon started creating new sounds, and by May 2001 we had assembled a nice collection of techno instrumental sketches, when director friend Roland Tec asked if we could put together some music for an off-Broadway show he was writing. Roland loved our sketches, and we ended up developing them into 35 minutes of music for Gratuitous Nudity, a collection of funny sexy monologues that ran all summer at the cool downtown club Barrio. This was a wonderful experience, and a fitting launch for our new project, Whirr & Click.

After Gratuitous Nudity ended its run, and September 11th came and went, we needed something deep to immerse ourselves in. Fortunately, Gordon's co-worker at WireImage, Carol Kassel, had invited us to see her band Estrogen perform live. We loved their show, and were so inspired that we started thinking of ways that we could perform some of our own material live. Thus began eleven months of practice, culminating in Rubberlegs' first-ever live performance at the Outmusic Open Mic at the C-Note, on October 7th, 2002. China Too and People Who Talk in Elevators were big hits with this wonderfully receptive gay audience, and we continued to work on translating our songs to live performance and to meet new people in the Outmusic community.

Kris Landherr invited us to join him at one of his LandShark! Shows, at Hannah's Lava Lounge. It was a night of '80s unplugged, called "Pretty in Pink". We played two Depeche Mode songs, on piano and voice. Soon after, we developed these songs and other '80s covers into 100% live electronic performances, which helped to round out our set and give us a chance to play some things without backing tracks. Thanks to LandShark!, we've been able to steadily develop a full set of material, now mostly originals. This has been an immensely fun and rewarding experience!

In 2003 we both moved. Bunny is now on E. 89th Street. Gordon is now back downtown on Avenue B, in a brand-new apartment that he shares with his boyfriend of four years, Tim (a.k.a. The Timinator). The studio, which we affectionately call Big Byte Sound, has found a new home in Gordon and Tim's guest bedroom.

Thanks to Robert Urban and Yolanda, we performed at Meow Mix and debuted our first brand-new Rubberlegs song, The Timinator, with lyrics set to a fleshed-out Whirr & Click sketch. We opened up for new friend *V*I*R*G*O*'s CYBURLESQUE multimedia extravaganza in September, not as Rubberlegs but as our instrumental alter ego, Whirr & Click. We feel incredibly fortunate to have met these wonderfully supportive, creative out-musicians.

Gordon is now performing solo as "Peg Rubberleg", and recently debuted at Freddy Freeman and Yolanda's Valentine's Day Qnity show, at CBGB's Lounge. As to the question of whether Peg is a man or a woman, he would like it to be known that she is about three-quarters of a man. That's a shameless plug for our song Sick of these Pegs, which just might be Peg's namesick (sic). Meanwhile, Bunny and Gordon have just released the first publicly available version of the Rubberlegs retrospective CD, Leg Warmers Reheated, thanks to Kris and his new LandShark! CD Duplication and Design service. The CD can be purchased on CDBaby.com, and we are now back in the studio, very excited to be working on new recordings.

Gordon Peg and Bunny Lake
April 2004

http://www.rubberlegs.com
http://www.rubberlegs.com/WhirrClick