Ever notice that "good clean fun" hardly ever means good or clean?
I've heard it used to refer to keg stands, sloppy rudiments, and murder.
So maybe I should retitle this "whatever happened to slightly bad-taste humor". I've been jonesing to make a lesson on how to get fired ever since some music friends and I invented the game "where's one, motherf###er" in 2009.
And by "some music friends and I", I mean "I, to the annoyance of my musician friends".
Being able to throw people off the beat while keeping it in my head used to be my definition of Good Clean Fun. And it's not like it's totally without precedent. See: Keith Jarrett trio, Chick Corea trio, Walter Smith Live in Paris, The Entire Gilad Hekselman canon, any time Justin Brown and Joe Infinity Sanders play together.
Oh, and Nate Wood and Tigran.
And the handy part about a good clean game of "where's one" is it segues perfectly into this week's topic: getting fired from gigs.
Getting fired is a bit of an abstraction for me since, A: I haven't depended on a "call back" since 2010. (A year after I invented the game. Daaaamn - conspiracy theory...)
Oh, and...B: even before then, you didn't really get "fired" from gigs in my circles, you just "didn't get called for the next thing".
But I can say safely that any "tears" I was going to cry as a result of getting fired, I'd probably cried out by 2009, and now it's all upside.
Which means I can safely teach you two of the beat displacement games that are fun if you too want to play stoicism games with your current portfolio of gigs...
...and relay to you the portfolio of "getting fired" stories from my good subscribers on YouTube, where people have been fired for reasons I'd never even heard of, including one guy who's lucky he's not a registered s#x @ffender by now. (Do the funky letters really stop email filters? I'm skeptical - seems like a "wives' tale". Meh I'll try it.)
And, just in time, I'll relate a couple of real-life "hard lessons" I had to learn the...um...."hard way".
I give you, This Week's Lesson: The Top 10 Ways to Get Fired From a Gig.