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Re-write this and then move to Draft:Jeffrey Wegener

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Jeffrey Wegener (b. 1955) is an Australian musician, who played drums in such bands as the Saints (1975/1985), the Last Words (1977), the Young Charlatans (1978), Laughing Clowns (1979-1985), The Birthday Party (1983) and Paris Green (1985-1986). In the early 2000s he reunited with erstwhile Laughing Clowns leader Ed Kuepper to perform as a duo and as a member of the Kowalski Collective, before the Clowns themselves re-formed to play a series of gigs around 2009-2010.

Career
Wegener is highly regarded for an innovative, explosive style that brings aspects of jazz to rock and brings to mind his heroes like Elvin Jones and Keith Moon. He is regularly cited as an inspiration by other such musicians as Lindy Morrison of the Go-Betweens, Jim White of the Dirty Three, and even non-drummers such as Nick Cave.

Jeffrey Wegener grew up in Ipswich just outside Brisbane, and it was at Corinda High School in the early 1970s that he met Ed Kuepper, Chris Bailey and Ivor Hay. While taking drum lessons from Harry Lebler, he joined the three in 1975 to briefly play in an early incarnation of their band the Saints that would explode out of Brisbane in 1976 with the punk-precursor single “(I'm) Stranded.”

Following the Saints to Sydney in 1977, Wegener joined a band there called the Last Words, another pioneering Australian punk outfit. He didn't play on their debut single “Animal World,” but did appear in its video.

Later in 1977, after meeting guitarist Rowland S. Howard in Sydney, he and bassist Janine Hall went with Howard back to his hometown of Melbourne and got together with singer/keyboardist Ian ‘Ollie’ Olsen to form a band called the Young Charlatans. The Young Charlatans were one of Australia’s first post-punk bands alongside others in Melbourne like the pre-Birthday Party Boys Next Door, the Primitive Calculators and Crime and the City Solution. Managed by Bruce Milne, then editor of the fanzine Pulp and a fledgling 3RRR DJ, the Charlatans broke up towards the end of 1978. Their demise, however, was seminal: Rowland Howard went on to join the Boys Next Door and start their transition into the Birthday Party, taking with him a song called “Shivers”, Ollie Olsen formed the all-electronic Whirlywirld, before going on to collaborate with Michael Hutchence in Max Q and leading many other acts, and Janine Hall got together with Chris Bailey, fresh from the demise of the original Saints, to become a member of Bailey’s new incarnation of the Saints.

The Saints’ demise in the UK in 1978 had seen guitarist/songwriter Kuepper return to Brisbane, and in 1979 Wegener joined him there to form a band. With saxophonist and fellow old Saints alumni Bob Farrell also on board, the trio moved to Sydney, recruited bassist Ben Wallace-Crabbe, and the Laughing Clowns were born.

Despite the fact that Ed Kuepper as well as Wegener has complained that the Laughing Clowns haven't got their due, the band has become one of Australia’s most revered alternative acts of the 80s. When they started playing gigs in Sydney at the end of 1979, a time when Sydney was awash with great new bands whether the Sunnyboys, INXS or Tactics, they stood out for their sheer singularity, and for the duration of their life up to 1985, despite fatuous labels like 'jazz-punk', their 'intense originality' was the band's defining feature.

So compelling was Wegener's playing in the Laughing Clowns that in 1980 Australian Rolling Stone magazine gave over a standalone feature story on him, for maybe the only time ever that a drummer was accorded such coverage. In common only with leader Kuepper, Wegener was the only other member of the band who was there from the first to the last; he played on all the band’s recordings. In 1981, he played a side-project (for him) as a member of Peter Milton Walsh’s band in between the early and later Apartments, Out of Nowhere, and he appeared on the band’s single “Remember, Remember,” that was released by the Laughing Clowns’ label, Prince Melon Records.

Always volatile, Wegener’s relationship with Ed Kuepper was often fraught. Towards the end of 1982, the Laughing Clowns made their first trip to the UK, and though the band was a big live draw and critical darlings in Australia, the reception overseas was much more muted, and as a result of the strain this put on the band, Ed Kuepper broke it up, in 1983. On the rebound, Wegener joined the Birthday Party to play some European gigs, but then Ed Kuepper recalled Wegener for a new line-up of the Laughing Clowns. But with his volatility and drug-use escalating, Kuepper was forced to finally, terminally dissolve the Laughing Clowns, in 1985.

Along with Clowns’ saxophonist Louise Elliot, Wegener played an Australian tour with Chris Bailey’s Saints in 1985 and then after a stint as a sometime-member of another shifting inner-city supergroup Paris Green (whose only constant was singer/keyboardist Louis Tillett), he fell off the treadmill and disappeared from view. His addiction had gotten the better of him and he had to rehabilitate.

After relocating to Brisbane and playing fleetingly with a few minor bands, Wegener reunited with Ed Kuepper in the early 2000s. Kuepper had been presented with the opportunity to provide a live, semi-improvised soundtrack to screenings of the short films of avant-garde New Zealand artist Len Lye, and he enlisted Wegener to play drums with him on a series of prestigious 2004 gigs in Australia and overseas. This led to the formation of the Kowalski Collective numbering Kuepper, Wegener, bassist Peter Oxley (formerly of the Sunnyboys) and (jazz) keyboardist Al Spence. Following the release in 2005 of the lavish Laughing Clowns 3CD retrospective box-set Cruel But Fair, the Kowalski Collective, in 2007, released the acclaimed concept album Jean Lee and the Yellow Dog, based on the story of the last woman hanged in Australia.

In a segment of Cruel But Fair’s liner notes written by Wegener, he articulated some of his modus operandi: “I suppose my work in the Clowns was a nexus between [my rock/punk] background and the jazz sort of influences I’d had since I started drumming… Prior to the Clowns, I had two musical worlds – the rock’n’roll I was playing was obviously the most important – but I also had my head into jazz. The Clowns, in an uncanny way, gave me the opportunity to do something with drumming that bought these two worlds together… Even when tensions existed between myself and Ed – which was a lot of the time – I can vividly remember, when on stage we were getting into the ‘burn zone’, so to speak, he would often turn around and just give me this wry smile. It was special stuff.”

After the original crucial three of Kuepper, Bailey and Ivor Hay re-formed the Saints to make a single appearance at the Pig City concert as part of the Brisbane Music Festival in 2007, Kuepper and Wegener convened as a duo to play some headline shows in the UK and support Nick Cave and the Bad Seeds on their 2008 tour of Europe. This led to the suggestion from Cave, who was curating the 2009 All Tomorrow’s Parties festival-tour of Australia, that not only should the re-formed Saints appear on the bill but also that the Laughing Clowns should re-form to do so too. With the band’s line-up numbering Kuepper, Wegener, Louise Elliot, Al Spence and bassist Les Miller (who appeared on the 1982 album Mr Uddich-Schmuddich Goes to Town), the Clowns played the ATP Australian tour and then again, in 2010, played the ATP’s Don't Look Back tour, performing their ‘greatest hits’ as collected on the 1984 album The History of Rock’n’Roll, Vol. 1.

Though Kuepper and Wegener have not collaborated again, Kuepper’s revived Prince Melon label has released numerous live albums featuring Wegener, including Ed Kuepper Live: The Euroboot Album (which is actually credited to Kuepper and Wegener), plus no less than three albums by the re-formed Laughing Clowns, confusingly all called Laughing Clowns Live.

In 2013, Wegener played on some tracks on Dirty Three guitarist Mick Turner's fourth solo album Don't Tell the Driver, and in 2019 he performed as part of a duo with Australian jazz saxophonist Mark Simmonds, which would transpire to be Simmonds' last gig before he died.