Depends on what you mean by "real". I started playing on a $60 K-Mart Tiesco Del Ray tulip single pickup. I guess you could call it real. Sometime after that, someone gave me a Sears guitar that had an amp built into the guitar. Likewise, I suppose it was real. They were both mostly playable...
Aerosmith back in the late 70s. They were so high they could barely stand up. Joe Perry kept playing intros to the wrong song and would have to stop and start over. And it was LOUD - even by 70s standards.
Def Leppard. I saw them long after their hit machine had run out of juice, and they were...
I love that series! Greg Garcia did another great show called Raising Hope. It is just as funny as Earl. He also did a series called Sprung which is funny, but not up to Earl and Hope standards.
I don't know about the rest of the country, but in Louisville in the mid 70s you couldn't listen to the radio for more than 10 minutes without hearing something from Frampton Comes Alive
From what I've read, Michael O'Hare (the actor playing Sinclair in the first season) was on a rapid downhill mental slide during filming. For the last half of season 1, they had to make lots of on the fly changes depending on how coherent he was.
I'm a fan. I've watched the whole series several times over.
I recently discovered a fan written prequel to the series called "The Digar Wars". It is a massive novel (4200 pages) covering the Dilgar war 30 years prior to the series. It is good stuff! Whoever wrote it really keeps to the spirit...