My second George’s Drum Shop was located in Copley Ohio starting in 2002 then moved to Cuyahoga Falls Ohio in 2006. I made and sold a lot of drum sets and snare drums during those years. This started as an outgrowth of my drum repair and refinishing work at the drum shop. I was buying shells from Keller a hundred at a time. They were all wrapped finishes. Some were unbadged and some had some sticker type badges from my first drum shop in Jackson Mississippi in the late 1980s. Around 2007 I wanted to establish higher quality drums with nice lacquer finishes as the Lawrence Drums brand. I had catalog photos made of three sets of shells that were lacquered in “Too Much Champagne Sparkle”, “Too Much Baby Blue Sparkle” and “Too Much Orange Sparkle”. The finishes were done by a friend, Tony ( can’t remember his last name ?????) who had an auto paint company in the North West. He had been doing custom finishes for Sonor artists. I asked him to put more sparkle chips in the paint than any other drum company had, thus the “too much sparkle” colors. I had planned on having more pictures made with hardware on the drums, but Tony lost his building to eminent domain by the city he lived in. He decided not to rebuild so my painter was gone and I decided to cut bait. I’m glad now that I never had the Lawrence Drums badges made. They were pretty fancy and would have cost me about $4000 for a box of 2000.
I sold those three sets to different drum shop customers. The drums looked and sounded great if I do say so myself. I bought the blue sparkle kit back from Keith McFerrin when he moved to Memphis in 2020. Recently the champagne sparkle kit resurfaced. Rick Rasicci emailed me that he had bought it from Guitar Center in Akron Ohio. He said it was filthy and that he would send pictures after he cleaned it up. thanks, Rick. Check out the pictures below. Now where is that elusive orange kit?
I had started Famous Drum Company with Joe Partridge in 2008 and put Famous badges on this kit before I finally sold it. The other two catalog kits were unbadged. Joe and I continued to make and sell snare drums until 2010 when the recession finally tanked the endeavor. I still have two or three of the Famous snares that Joe built. We experimented with a lot of different shell modifications like the Tone Ring model below.
So the lineage was George’s Drum Shop drums (1985), Lawrence Drums (2006) then Famous Drum Company (2008). The Famous Drums are now being made by my stepson, Evan Thomas in Phoenix. We sell mostly raw steam bent single ply snare drum Radio King type shells to drum builders all over the world. I’m still involved but Evan is doing most of the heavy lifting.
https://www.notsomoderndrummer.com/#/famous-drum-company