In 1990 I saw Nirvana at Hampshire College, when they were a band you had to explain to your friends. Eighteen months later I saw them three nights running: Axis in Boston the night before Nevermind came out, Axis again the night it hit the shelves, and Club Babyhead in Providence the night after. My band had spent the week before jamming on Smells Like Teen Spirit off the single. I stood a few feet from Cobain both Axis nights, watching him play those barre chords, and then the band I'd been seeing in small rooms stopped existing. Not because they changed - because the market found out.
Start with the audit → Email Russell See ServicesEveryone knows Nevermind changed music. What you could only see from inside those rooms is how narrow the window was - a college gym, two club nights, a punk dive, and then it was over. The small-room price of that band existed for about seventy-two more hours after the record shipped, and I spent them standing in front of the stage.
Hampshire College, before the machine. A loud band from Washington State that a certain kind of person was already sure about, playing to a room that fit everyone in New England who agreed. This is the show from my homepage's Nirvana problem - the one that made me a witness instead of a customer.
The lesson: being early is indistinguishable from being wrong, right up until the moment it isn't. Nothing about that room said "biggest band in the world." Early never does.
Night one was a radio station's birthday party - WFNX turning eight, three openers including the Smashing Pumpkins with Gish a few months old, Nirvana walking on at midnight, 21-plus at the door. Night two was the correction: an all-ages show added so the kids locked out the night before could get in, played on the very day Nevermind reached the stores. I was up front both nights, close enough to watch the barre chords.
The lesson: the same hands played the same four chords both nights. Nothing about the product changed between the 23rd and the 24th. What changed was distribution - a record on a shelf - and distribution is what did the repricing.
A punk club in Providence, the day after the release. The room had no idea it was a historical event; it thought it was Wednesday. Within weeks the band was on national television and the album was headed to number one, and no cover charge in New England would ever buy that view again.
The lesson: repricings look instantaneous in hindsight. Up close, there was a window - short, quiet, and open to anyone paying attention - between the insiders knowing and the price moving.
The Teen Spirit single came out about two weeks before the album, and my band did what every band in New England did that month: learned it. It isn't hard. That's part of its genius - four barre chords, the kind of progression a garage band tightens up in an afternoon. We jammed on it in the practice space the week before Nevermind dropped, which means for about a week I was in a band that played Smells Like Teen Spirit before most of America had heard it. We knew it was a hit. Everyone who touched it knew. And knowing was worth exactly nothing.
Every band in New England could play those four chords. One band owned them. The difference was never the chords.
That's the first lesson, and it's the one that runs my consulting practice: recognizing the hit is not the same as owning the hit. Knowledge without position pays nothing - the poker version is that correctly reading a hand you're not in wins zero dollars. Lawyers do this with marketing constantly. They can all see that local search matters, that AI answers are starting to decide who gets called, that the firm with the best web presence in a county eats first. Seeing it is the barre chords. Being positioned when the demand arrives is the record deal.
The second lesson is about the window. From a distance, Nirvana's explosion looks like a light switch: obscure in August, everywhere by Christmas. From the front row it had a visible seam - three nights when the record was out or nearly out, the insiders were already sure, and you could still stand next to the stage in a club for pocket money. Markets for legal services reprice the same way. Right now, in your county, the cost of owning a practice area's visibility is a punk-club cover charge, because most of your competitors haven't heard the single yet. When they have, the same position costs arena prices - and the firms that moved early aren't selling.
The third lesson I only got because I was close enough to watch his hands. From three feet away, the thing that was about to change music looked simple. It was simple - that was the trick. What I couldn't see from the front row was the machine: the label, the radio push, the video in heavy rotation, the distribution that put that record in every store in America on the same Tuesday. Your competitor's marketing can look just as simple - a clean website, a few good reviews, showing up first when someone asks their phone who to call. The simplicity is what you can see. The machine is what you're up against, and it's the part someone has to know how to build.
I went home from Babyhead to a band that could play the song and a scene full of people who'd seen it coming, and none of us owned any of it. Thirty years of trying cases taught me plenty, but that week taught me the thing I now get paid to say out loud: the market doesn't reward the people who knew. It rewards the people who were positioned when everyone else found out.
For criminal defense lawyers who want to own their county's visibility while it still costs a cover charge - local search, AI answers, and the positioning work that has to be done before the crowd shows up.
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