Thanks chick! And I LOVE your avatar! Colbert is my idol.
I think Kurt Cobain had the most left to give to me personally. Jimi Hendrix was incredibly prolific and he made a pretty large output despite his short time. I mean, I've heard of as many as 10s of albums of previously unreleased Hendrix material, although some of it is out of print. I do agree that Hendrix probably would have made a big impact on jazz & ilk, but that's not my kind of music. Hendrix's later stuff for me was getting a little too technical, I long for the rock n roll abandon of his earlier stuff. My guess is that Hendrix would have been at least as prolific in output as Neil Young, but probably as idiosyncratic as well. Which, I guess isn't a bad thing for most people since after all Neil Young is my favorite artist ever...
As for Kurt Cobain, who knows how prolific he would have been. Some people say that he wasn't a very prolific artist since In Utero had at least a few songs which had been around since before Nevermind, implying that Kurt hadn't been writing very much. But I think he was just extremely selective. Nevermind itself had some pretty old songs on it, I think the follow-up to In Utero would have had some gems from pre-In Utero times as well. I think the biggest evidence of how selective Kurt was is the fact that he threw away at least a couple of albums of brilliant material... first of all there is the entire 13+ songs from Fecal Matter, the only one of which to get released officially is Spank Thru. Even more convincing is the material on the Nirvana box set With The Lights Out. Sure it has demos on it but I made 2 CDs out of the completely new songs on the set and they are my 2 favorite Nirvana albums of all-time. Those songs that Kurt threw away not only once (when they were originally made) but essentially twice (by not including them on Incesticide) is just ridiculous. Songs like Anorexorcist, Old Age, Verse Chorus Verse, Blandest & Clean Up Before She Comes are my favorite Nirvana songs and I think they would have held up to the rest of Nirvana's catologue if they had been used for albums. It's also said that he and Dave Grohl came up with scores of songs while living together in 1990 and they never got them on tape...
So who knows whether Kurt would have been a sporadic creator like I predicted. But absolutely whatever he did I'm sure I would have loved it. He clearly had some very different musical goals he wanted to accomplish, so I think if he had been around a little bit longer the general opinion about his music would have been altered somewhat. Kurt apparently wanted to do more stuff in the vein of YKYR and Milk It, which is my favorite #1 style of Nirvana's music. A lot of people who don't like Nirvana at least admit to liking or respecting Unplugged, and I think it's obvious Kurt would have done some more stuff of that sort, particularly with Michael Stipe who he literally had already arranged to meet up with. Also I'd be very interested to hear what Kurt thinks of music today and bands since then like Neutral Milk Hotel... And having him around might have kept Silverchair & Nickelback down a bit.... or not.