‘Nirvana: Taking Punk to the Masses’ opens Saturday in Seattle. By Gil Kaufman Nirvana’s Kurt Cobain in the early ’90s Photo: Kevin Mazur/WireImage SEATTLE — It’s fitting that on Monday morning, the inside of the “Nirvana: Taking Punk to the Masses” exhibit at the Experience Music Project in this Northwestern music mecca looked much like the band’s music sounded: messy, splintered into 1,000 pieces, all over the place, yet somehow meticulously together and beautifully chaotic. Museum workers inside this gleaming temple to the enduring influence of the city and region’s musical heritage were in a mad scramble to get the first-of-its-kind exhibition of Nirvana artifacts into shape for Saturday’s opening. Glass display cases with spots destined to feature one-of-a-kind treasures stood empty, while others were already fitted with touchstone effects. Among them were the iconic green sweater worn by late singer Kurt Cobain in the “Smells Like Teen Spirit” video, the hastily drawn-up recording contract with Sub Pop Records promising the group $600 for their first album and a then-princely $12,000 for their second and a variety of smashed guitars from pivotal points in the band’s career. But curator Jacob McMurray cautioned that “Taking Punk to the Masses” is much more than a deification of already grunge-sainted late singer Cobain. “One of the things that was really important to me is that it isn’t a novel that I’m writing,” he said. “It isn’t about me or EMP, so I wanted to make sure through the oral-history quotes and the video that it’s all being told as much as possible through the primary sources.” Check out photos of Kurt Cobain’s art, broken guitars and more on exhibit. Like so many projects at the EMP, the 225-piece Nirvana show leans heavily on videotaped interviews with the musicians, producers, artists and scene-makers who contributed to and influenced the music that would, in turn, influence Nirvana. Giant iPod-like touch-pad video kiosks feature dozens of vintage posters, fanzines and artwork chronicling punk scenes from Minneapolis, Los Angeles and New York that helped set the groundwork for Nirvana, as well as more than 100 oral histories of little-known local, regional and national bands like Ze Whiz Kidz, the Tupperwares, the Lewd and U Men who stirred dozens of local future notables to take up instruments. The exhibition — which will run two years and then may tour the country — opens with a trio of images of Nirvana in their prime and spotlights one of drummer Dave Grohl’s Tama drum kits from 1993-’94, with a note about how he hit the skins so hard that he went through several kits during his tenure in the band. And though it was not yet hung, the opening space will also feature Cobain’s treasured Mosrite Gospel guitar, which he was playing at the OK Hotel show in Seattle on April 17, 1991, when he debuted “Teen Spirit” live. Bassist Krist Novoselic lives on a farm south of Seattle and is the head of his local grange hall, and the rough-hewn wooden cases for some of the displays are from a 100-year-old elm tree that fell on the grange property. McMurray bought the wood from Novoselic for use housing the items, many of which came from the private collections of Novoselic, Grohl and former drummer Chad Channing. “From grunge to grange,” McMurray laughed. There are also a series of iPod listening stations loaded with a selection of influential bands such as R.E.M., H
