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By the way, I really wasn't trying to talk shit about Kurt when I made that comment about the "Drain You" interlude. I don't actually think Kurt was a poor or ungifted guitarist. The mere fact that he wrote "Come As You Are," and played that riff while singing over it should be evidence against the argument that he was "bad." Not that it's a difficult song for an intermediate guitarist to play and sing, but it's not the kind of thing someone who's just guessing can pull off.
What I was trying to say was that when I was younger, I used to listen to that break in Drain You and wonder why so little was going on with the guitar part. I may have previously thought, "This is smoke and mirrors, and he's trying to cover for a lack of ability" ... But just because Kurt wasn't a Moore/Ranaldo-level composer — just because he probably could have never in his life cleanly pulled off "The Sprawl," — doesn't mean he was a bad guitarist.
I do think his brain wanted to do more than his fingers would allow, and that he had to practice like a madman, even after they became successful, to nail some of the parts he'd written for himself. And I say that as a musician who's done plenty of brute-force muscle memory mastery in my time. BUT, looking at the parts he wrote, the sounds and feelings he managed to convey with his riffs and his melodies, and his weird chord choices, I think he was actually one of he most effective guitarists in the history of rock.
Kind of like John Lennon. Lennon couldn't touch Harrison or McCartney in actual skill. But man, he made up for it with a truly whacked out ability to riff, with serious muscle. I think Plastic Ono Band is, for what it's worth, one of the most Nirvana-analogous albums out there. Listening to Lennon's crunching two-string riffing on that album is almost like listening to Kurt playing the blues. I would never call Lennon a virtuoso guitarist. Nobody who knows anything about him or the instrument ever would. But it would be equally stupid and unreasonable to write him off as a bad player. Same goes for Kurt. In my opinion, anyway.
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