Do you ever wonder?

Audiofeil,
I've never seen them live. Perhaps, like you, I would appreciate them more.

Not that I completely dislike them, their staying power after all these years surprises me.

I must agree with you concerning the Grateful Dead. Those are my 3 favorite albums. In fact Workingmans Dead is one of the first albums I ever bought.

Like you I find some of Garcias solo work interesting. Particularly with David Grisman.

Best,

Dave

It's all plain and simple to finalize:
There are bands that have most of income from recordings and there are bands that have most of income from live performances. There are also bands that are happy with income from recordings and would not wish to work harder to perform live.
Here also comes very important show-biz factor: frequency. Frequency of live performances, number of sold recordings affect consumer demand. More frequent live performances and frequent large distribution of recordings certainly can decrease demand on artist. So there's always a decision to make: to tour or to record a new album.
The year of 2011 seemed to shut up most of the good artists as I haven't had any descent live concert exposure.

Practically every other person I ever come across likes music that I find unfathomable. Their entire listening habits are populated by artists that possess little or no talent that I can see or from musical genres that I loathe. It's often stated that if we were all alike life would be boring and of course that rings true with music. It does allow some of us to bask in the warmth of superiority and that does provide some solace to this occasionally dreary life.
My personal list of artists I cannot stand and that are hugely popular would be far too many to list. Although, it would be a pretty safe bet to state that 99.9(recurring)% of all artists to have charted in either the UK or USA in the last 35 years would make the list.

Jsd52756 saying that Tom Waits is bad means you diddnt aquire good taste yet...but maybe youll learn someday...maybe...reading your post makes me shure that hes any album is better than anything you have in your CD pile(what a waste of money)...cheers...