Massive thread self-resurrection:
The background to my original post was my growing dissatisfaction with running a band (1 band with 2 names in fact!). I set it up as a benevolent dictatorship, which cuts 2 ways - yes I got to run things my way, but the buck stopped with me. Worst of all, I found evening after evening being taken up with Things That Are Not Fun - hustling gigs, sending out demo CDs and contracts, tweaking set lists, uploading mp3s/dots/lyrics to Dropbox, finding deps etc. I also often feel like it all rests on my shoulders when I'm on a gig. I usually end up enjoying the gig, but at the expense of a fair bit of worry beforehand.
I've realised I function better when I am trying to do a good job for someone, rather than asking someone to do a good job for me. I therefore took the decision to wind my bands down, and put myself out there solely as a dep. I play both bass and guitar, so that doubles my opportunities. It's not an easy way out, just a different set of challenges that are a better fit to my personality. Around 1/4 of my gigs are deps anyway, so iI just need to grow that. And I hope it will be fun!