Krist Novoselic and the beatification of Nirvana

During seven years in Nirvana, Krist Novoselic witnessed all manner of unscheduled onstage chaos, often featuring the abuse of musical instruments. His forehead is scarred from the moment he hurled his bass into the air at the 1992 MTV awards and failed to catch it. But neither he nor anyone else at the opening of a museum exhibition dedicated to Nirvana is prepared for the impromptu intervention of one of his former bandmates.

Christina Orr-Cahall, CEO of Seattle's Experience Music Project, has just got to the part of her speech where she thanks the museum's corporate benefactors when a figure appears onstage, yells "Corporations still suck!", then slips back into the audience. Novoselic recognises the interloper as Aaron Burckhard: the man who played drums for Nirvana before the band even had a name.

If Burckhard's protest goes unheeded, it's possibly because the event feels surreal enough already. The Frank Gehry-designed EMP – funded by Microsoft co-founder Paul Allen – is a futuristic temple to the power of technology. The VIP opening of Nirvana: Taking Punk to the Masses is held in the museum's "Sky Church", a vast hall with a 70ft ceiling, the guest speakers dwarfed by the world's largest indoor video screen. There's a pointed contrast between the hi-tech setting and the exhibition's vivid exposition of Nirvana's unprepossessing origins in Aberdeen, a poor logging town in rural Washington.

Certainly, as the former director of Norton Art Museum in Florida, Christina Orr-Cahall's grunge credentials are slim. Her fellow speakers shape up better: local politician Dow Constantine claims he used to hang out at Seattle's hardcore punk club the Metropolis during the pre-grunge era, while EMP curator Jacob McMurray worked for 18 months assembling the exhibition. It's testimony to his sensitive approach that Novoselic and other key figures agreed to collaborate, lending a wealth of archive material – instruments, clothing, letters, audio tapes and other, more quixotic items, such as the pink Samsonite suitcase used as an ad hoc drum kit by the 15-year-old Kurt Cobain on his first-ever recording. The suitcase belonged to Cobain's mother Wendy, who is present in the audience at EMP with Kurt's sister, Kim.

Both are acknowledged by Novoselic in a speech that, like the exhibition itself, seeks to place the Nirvana phenomenon in its proper context: as a culmination of the US underground rock scene that took inspiration from punk in the late 70s and gradually developed into a network of local communities, each operating independently of the mainstream music apparatus, and each with its distinct cultural characteristics. Novoselic thanks the mother of Dale Crover, for letting her son's band the Melvins practise in her house on West Second Street in Aberdeen, rehearsal sessions at which the teenage Krist befriended a kid two years his junior named Kurt. As much as it possibly can be, the personality cult of Cobain is de-emphasised, though for obvious reasons there's poignancy in hearing Novoselic speak of his friend, as opposed to the tragic rock star.

"Here was a man who would never clean his kitchen or take out the garbage, or do those kind of chores. But Kurt Cobain was not a lazy person. We came to Seattle and we recorded a demo. Kurt Cobain earned the money for that: he was a janitor and he worked nights. Basically he cleaned toilets – that's how he paid for that demo. That's how hard he worked. He was a compelled artist, who excelled at every form he wanted to do. When I walk down the street, even tonight – people walked up to me and said: 'Nirvana changed my life.' And I think that's a testament to Kurt Cobain and the vision he was channelling. I owe him so much, I can't even start. So many people owe Kurt Cobain."

The audience listening to Novoselic includes Jack Endino, the man who recorded Nirvana's first proper demo tape and produced their debut album Bleach, plus Bruce Pavitt whose Sub Pop record label released that album, and Charles Peterson whose black and white photographs of bands like Soundgarden and Mudhoney, as well as Nirvana, helped codify the scene's visual aesthetic as well as proclaim the visceral power of the music simmering in this then unfashionable corner of America. All three individuals have contributed to the EMP exhibit, with Endino and Pavitt providing vivid recollections and analysis for the massive cache of oral history that visitors can access through headphones at a series of touchscreens; each contains six hours of material. Peterson's pictures, meanwhile, are enlarged over entire walls of the building, with the entrance foyer dominated by the image of a guitar-playing, crowd-surfing Cobain at Vancouver's Commodore Ballroom.

Given the man's iconoclastic sensibilities, it is certainly incongruous to see the shirt Cobain is wearing in that photograph displayed in a cabinet, along with various other items of his clothing, including a beige cardigan with the unintentionally risible caption: "One of Nirvana's appeals was that they wore everyday clothes and not rock star costumes. Cobain was a fan of cardigans and he wore this often."

Yet the elevation of such mundane items into museum pieces feels less mawkish now than it might once have done. Time has blunted the possible pain inherent in commemorating a band whose story ended in tragedy, but more significant is the wholehearted participation of Nirvana's surviving members: Chad Channing and Dave Grohl (who both contribute drum kits) and especially Novoselic. He narrates the exhibit's audio guide, and the majority of the candid and often very funny photographs come either from his personal archive or that of his ex-wife, Shelli Hyrkas. Even the display case wood originated with him: Novoselic lives on a farm in Deep Water, a remote corner of south-west Washington, and is the master – or chair – of the local Grange, an agrarian self-help group. When a 100-year-old elm tree fell on Grange land, it was by a happy coincidence at the time EMP's Jacob McMurray was initiating plans for the Nirvana exhibition.

"I convinced the members: let's mill this elm up and it'll be a fundraiser for the group," Novoselic tells me. "So we sold it to EMP for $3,000 and now we're buying windows for our Grange hall. I like the EMP approach: it's scholarly, these are museum people. I said to Jacob: Come on over, because I've got all this gear just laying around in a closet. Here are the photos – go through them and take what you want. Here's the Buck Owens American guitar [played by Pat Smear on MTV Unplugged] – take it. Here's a guitar I dropped on my head, famously. Take it! Here's a bass I played on Unplugged. Take it! Those are good instruments that I enjoyed playing, but guitars grow legs and they walk off. Never to be seen again. Someone swiped my guitar right off the stage at the 1992 Reading festival. Who knows where that guitar is? Because I was in Nirvana, I can't take these guitars out of the house. So I figured if people would enjoy it, I might as well hand them to a museum, where it's put in context and it's educational."

The EMP exhibit offers no more vivid physical illustration of the jarring relationship between art and commerce than the Mosrite Gospel, one of Kurt Cobain's favourite guitars: taking care never to smash it, he wrote many of Nevermind's songs on the instrument and it was played at the legendary 17 April 1991 gig at Seattle's OK Hotel, where Nirvana debuted Smells Like Teen Spirit to the public. Originally purchased in August 1990 by Cobain from a used guitar shop in San Francisco, it was sold at auction in 2006 for $131,450 and is now owned by a venture capitalist, who loaned it to EMP.

Although there is an undoubted frisson to such items, the contents of Novoselic's closet offer the best insight into a story that has been over-mythologised during the past 20 years. Beneath a glass cabinet containing the four-track reel-to-reel tape recorder on which Cobain recorded his early demos and his mother's Samsonite suitcase, we can read a letter, dated 16 April 1986, written by the Melvins' Buzz Osborne to Novoselic, who had recently moved to Arizona. Osbourne talks excitedly of a tape that "Ko-bain" and Dale Crover have made at the home of Kurt's Aunt Mari. "Some of [Kurt's] songs are real killer! … I think he could have some kind of a future in music if he keeps at it."

For Novoselic, such bittersweet memories are a fact of his life. For years after Cobain's death in April 1994 he found himself stopping at pawn shops in downtown Seattle and looking for left-handed guitars to replace the latest casualty of Nirvana's auto-destructive concert finales. "I'm thinking: 'Hey Kurt, I found this guitar for you; it'll work, we'll restring it.' Then I'm like, Oh – I don't need to do that any more." Today he enjoys the privacy of life on the farm, though he's far from reclusive: aside from his Grangemaster duties, he's studying for a law degree at Lower Columbia Community College ("I'm getting straight As") and is a passionate advocate of proportional representation as the chair of FairVote. He also finds time to combine his other two loves: aviation and music. A few weeks before the EMP opening, he flew his Cessna down the coast to California where he met up with Crover and Osborne for a jam.

"There are a lot of things I would do differently in life, but I just didn't have the skill or the awareness to do it," he says. "Just personally, I got caught off guard. The whole thing ended in a disaster. It didn't have to end like that. So if I'd just had more maturity and more life experience I would have done things differently. Other bands dealt with it. But it is what it is. I've been playing with Buzz and Dale for 30 years. That goes together pretty well." He laughs and fingers the link between politics and punk. "People naturally associate. I found Kurt Cobain and Buzz Osborne. And I had something in common with them, I had a need and values, and we just naturally came together. That's my sexy message to the kids: it's gonna take a lot of work and you need to be involved!"

For further information on Nirvana: Taking Punk to the Masses, visit bit.ly/empnirvana