Careful there...getting close to a generalization! <LOL>Seriously, the people who don't like that must not like classic rock or hard rock as they go together like a ball and a glove.
But I do sort of agree with you as far as attending the live concerts goes. I love their recordings for the most part, but have never gone out of my way to see them live.
And, I will admit freely that those to whose concerts I attend do tend to be the ones that entertain me by their musical performances and not their special effects. They are also the ones I've spent the lions' share of my hard earned bucks on recordings.
Now I don't know where the big stage production bands with all the special effects fit in here....maybe they don't fit in at all. And maybe some of them fit and others don't:
But I do know that the Eagles work to the nth degree on perfection of rendering a performance live on stage that is exactly what fans have bought with they purchase their recordings. No surprises. They carry this to an extreme that some find distasteful because there ARE NO SURPRISES.
Some bands aren't like that. The Grateful Dead were almost the mirror image. They sucked on recordings but there was never a band who performed better live than they did. And other than being doped to the gills, they didn't use special effects...the audience did however and maybe that is why they were such a fantastic Live Band.
I emphasize here that I do NOT know these other bands like the AC/DC reference that keeps coming up. I don't know if they were or are as good on stage "technically" as they are on the recordings that come out of the studio.
I have a close friend who toured with Ray Price playing Violin in his backing band. He could make that fiddle talk. He could play a guitar with accomplishment also but wouldn't play anything other than acoustic....except for bass...he played electric bass. He was at my house one summer afternoon and there was a garage band with the knobs all on 11 making noise that would cause the dead to twitch. The distortion was so over the top that you could hardly fathom what they were attempting to play. But everyone at that party was pretty well primed on booze and whatever else was available and probably didn't care. But Rob looks over at me and says, "Mike, there is a time for distortion and a time NOT for distortion. When you hear that much distortion on everything, it is a mask to cover up all the mistakes." In that case, I'm quite sure he was right because you couldn't recognize the their songs from the instruments....sometimes you could recognize what they were trying to do by the lyrics...NOT the Vocals <LOL>
At Crossroads Guitar Festival, I attended a guitar clinic. The artists' name will come to me before long, but suffice to say he is well known. He made a statement that stuck with me. He said that the test of a great guitarist is how well they play acoustic with no more assistance than enough electronics to amplify the natural sound of the acoustic guitar they are playing. In this guys words, "With an Acoustic Guitar, there is no place to hide. It's just you and the guitar and every mistake you make is obvious to everybody." He went on to praise the guy who was to be the winner of the Amateur Guitarist Contest. This guy played nothing but acoustic and he was going up against schreaders who were playing 128 notes a measure!
I wonder if at times some of the "big guys" may be using the props to make a performance more acceptable? Not because they are not capable of superb performances but because maybe they can't equal their studio work in a live performance.
I think most bands have to make concessions in live performances in reproducing on stage what they did in the studio. With all the overdubs it might take 5 or 6 guitarists to replicate what was released as a recording of a Power Trio. Maybe they can't reproduce that recorded sound so they give the audience something at the concert that they couldn't experience on
CD.
In that case, I'd about as soon just listen to the CD.
Give me someone like the Eagles or Three Dog Night or the Band of Heathens for a live concert. They all give you their best and their best is as good in most cases as their recordings and they don't throw all the glitz and glam and sensational at you.