I don't know if this counts or not, given all the circumstances:
A couple years ago I answered an ad by a drummer who was trying to put together an oldies rock band, with an eye towards playing car cruise nights and things like that. There was a cattle call audition and while these people (he and a woman I assume was his girlfriend, although she introduced herself as his "producer") were not the most professional, it looked like it might be fun. I was invited to be in the band, and we had several conversations in which he talked a very good game about what he wanted to do, and expressed strong agreement with my desire to try to really capture the feel and arrangements of the original songs---of course it's easy to play every 50s hit written as one 12-bar-in-A medley, but I wanted to aim a little higher than that. Yes, absolutely, right there with me, he says.
After a couple weeks a band was more or less assembled. Now, from early on, this guy had mentioned an open stage at the local VFW hall, which he thought we should play, since he seemed to think gigs might be forthcoming if we did well, and he swore that we could go there and blow everybody away. (Based on some open mics I've been to, that was at least potentially credible.)
Well, we had our first rehearsal with the full band, and it went okay, although some of the other guys didn't seem much like they were very meticulous about the music---and he says that we should play the VFW open stage THAT WEEKEND. I thought that was a little precipitous, but he was very excited, and the other people seemed up for it, so I figured, okay.
We went there, and played, and a couple things immediately became apparent:
1) This, in fact, was the whole goal of the band: for this guy to get up in front of his buddies at the VFW hall and play. Any other gigs would be purely coincidental.
2) His bar for what was an acceptable public performance was so low as to be nonexistent.
3) There was never any prospect of us blowing away everybody at the open stage---while some of the other performers were awful, the main core group of guys were pretty decent musicians who had been playing together at this thing every Friday for years if not decades, and included at least one guy who had been an actual professional rock singer back in the 70s. They had a pretty high overall talent level and they were accustomed to playing together, in stark contrast to our group in both regards.
Mulling all this over subsequently, I concluded that the drummer leading the band was simply delusional and decided I would not continue with his vanity project. But before I told him, he announced a new opportunity, which forestalled my actual quitting:
Ever since the first time I met him I had heard constantly about his son, who was apparently hot stuff out in L.A. doing nouveau rockabilly or something. Well, it turns out the son was going to be in town and would perform with us at the VFW the following week! I was sufficiently intrigued that I decided to stick around for one more show. The practice schedule got screwed up or something---I don't remember exactly what happened, but basically, they sent me some mp3s but we did not get together in person prior to the show.
So I showed up, and the first sign of trouble was, the drummer informed me that he had cleverly (he thought) signed up twice, once under his son's name and once under the name of his "producer". This is, as many of you will know, a gross breach of open stage etiquette---stage hogging. Now, that woman was very nice but could not sing to save her life; the phrase "bovine bellowing" is particularly apt. And she was going to do a whole set of tunes. And she ended up going first. And the arrangements (if you can call them that) that they did were different from the recordings they had sent me. Worst of all, the practice at that open stage was, you got to do three songs; people who did really well were sometimes invited to do another song or two. Well, after three songs, she just launched into a fourth song, despite the fact that the performance up till then had been pretty much a train wreck. And after that, she launched into a fifth song. At that point the host basically kicked her off stage---she was preparing to do a sixth song.
Naturally, they were in no hurry to let us back up on stage again. So after almost two hours of sitting around, it occurred to me that I was not that interested in seeing what the drummer's kid would do, and anyway, I had never rehearsed with them, the songs were simple 50s standards, and I knew that the regular bass player who came every week could hang with them easily, as well as I could. So I packed up and went home.
Does that count as "quitting in the middle of a gig"? I did play the (extended) set I expected to play when I arrived that night. And, would you have done differently? It was probably not professional, but I figured those clowns had forfeited any right to professional respect, and I assure you, the audience did not suffer, or care.
