They did. The tag on the Speckled interior will be in the high 90000 to above 100,000 range. The others... Lower 90s and below.

Born together... could be. These got shipped, those got shipped... four months later, sold together in the store.

Thanks for your input, Ploughman! It's ALWAYS good hearing from you. I appreciate the information you provided!

I just looked at a publication that mentioned that Rogers' warehousing moved to Dayton in 1966 (after the CBS buy-out) through 1969. The article stated that their Cleveland-stickered shells featured flat gray primer (except for the Dyna-Sonics), while their Dayton drums featured the speckled gray.

A kit I recently purchased features all Dayton (Holiday) drums. Three of them with serial numbers 70930, 77617 and 80979 have the flat gray primer, while one with a serial number of 95439 has the speckled gray.

This supports The Ploughman's input (thanks again), but contradicts what I recently read in the publication.

Is there a way to tell exactly what years the respective drums were manufactured, based on the serial numbers, or is the best we can obtain simply a general idea?

Rogers Swivo-era tags can give a good approximation of year/date, but it's widely agreed that there's no definitive chronological rule, as those tags were pulled from bins at random. I've been trying to document the correlation between tag number ranges and the types of hardware associated with each period. I think knowing which hardware is correct on a particular drum is more important than knowing the specific year that drum was made.

As far as the shell interior paint goes, most dating guides point to Holiday serial number 90xxx as the approximate switchover from gray paint to speckled, but we know that change actually happened a bit before that. The lowest Holiday number I've seen with a speckled interior is Dayton tag #88308, and the highest number I've seen with a gray interior is Dayton tag #83883, so we know the change occurred somewhere in that 5000 gap. If anyone can volunteer info on serial numbers between these two tags, we can narrow the interior paint change even finer.

I'm still working on narrowing down specifically when the tone controls changed and all the evolutions of lug nut/washer combinations. All this helps to identify factory-original drums from "restorations". Of course, all the strange, random anomalies that occurred on the Rogers assembly line can throw off all our dating attempts, like this old Cleveland Tower label (with "Holiday" hand written) stuck onto a speckled Dayton shell...

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Mike

The Cook Book is really good. It isn't perfect. And as with any forensic history, research often follows the publication which puts some of the published material into the obsolete category. There was the Rogers Book, 1st Edition. It was followed by the 2nd Edition a few years later. And even now, there is good reason for a 3rd edition.

I have this tag on a 22" bass.

Is this tag correct?

I'm confused on all the time periods also.

Thanks

Wayne

Is that tag correct? Well, yes, sort of. That's a perfect example of the arbitrary, random way in which tags were applied to shells during the Swivo era. An assembler in the Rogers plant obviously didn't have the proper Holiday label available for your bass, so he simply grabbed a Powertone snare label and overwrote "Powertone" with "Holiday". Worked just fine from his perspective. As long as it had a Rogers label, everything's fine, right? Who would care exactly which serial number was on the shell? That Powertone serial number dates the label to 1969, but who's to say how long that label sat around the workshop waiting to be applied to a Holiday bass? See how messy this gets?

Reading Cook's book on Rogers gives you an incredible insight into just how casual production was in the small Rogers factory. I'm sure those workers would have been quite amused at the detailed, label forensics we'd be conducting 50 years later.

I also find Big R labels and dating confusing, but Ploughman's incredibly detailed and well-researched dating guide on the whole Big R era makes that entire era fairly clear. We all owe a lot to him for that.

Mike