Hey, what can I say? His soloing on Cortez the Killer is absolutely fantastic, IMHO. And the riot of noise that is the soloing on Rockin' In The Free World is tremendous. He gets perhaps rightfully trashed for Down by The River and Cinnamon Girl because the "solos" are not really lead breaks, just single note textures. But his general attitude of using the electric guitar as an almost broad-brush abstract artform is very moving to me.
Relating to my comments about Neil's single-note solos: I ran across this YouTube video that discusses a particular song with a particular one-note approach to the sax solo (which fails, in this case), but it brings up all the ways it can succeed, by showing examples from other songs (including Neil's Cinnamon Girl):
The subject song failed with that solo for a couple of main reasons, as I best understand and conclude: a lack of conviction on the part of the player (the sessions were rushed, didn't have time to really get the groove, as it were); and a lack of underlying chords to play against.
I got to that video after watching a video by the same YouTuber about The Girl from Ipanema - that song has some interesting characteristics about it, some of which got "whitewashed away" by the Berklee School of Music "Real Book" transcription.
And while watching that video about the Girl from Ipanema, seeing/hearing the different chord shapes, I was reminded that a lot of what makes up a hypothetical Mount Rushmore is the surrounding and supporting boulders and pebbles, without which the granite façade would have nothing to support it. The demonstration of Joao Gilberto's chording using three notes but never including the root note is inspiring to me, since I sometimes mess around with awkward chords and wonder when the chord police are going to come and lock me away for musical abuse. It is that sort of stuff that can inspire the faces that ultimately end up on your own personal Mount Rushmore, even if Joao himself is not up there.