Re: Hold on a minute!!! There are two Bill Lawrence companies?
ArtieToo is right.
There are 2 web sites, billlawrenceusa.com and billlawrence.com. Both have stories over what happened and who's the real Bill Lawrence. Both have sold Bill Lawrence pickups to Washburn for the Dimebag and Nuno Bettencourt guitars.
Willi Stich was a guitar player and pickup designer. He had a stage name of Willi Lorenze. He also had an engineering background from the military. He met Wajcman who owned some music stores. He was impressed with Lorenze's pickups so the two went into business, and changed Willi's name and the name of the company to Bill Lawrence since it was easier to pronounce. They produced the first Bill Lawrence pickups.
Eventually the two men split ways, and Wajcman kept producing the Bill Lawrence pickups under Bill Lawrence USA, which he had the right to do since he still owned the Bill Lawrence trade name, even though he wasn't Bill Lawrence. These were the pickups widely av available in some mysic stores and Stewart Macdonald.
The man Bill Lawrence went back to Germany and began building his pickups there under the name Bill Lawrence. Bill came back to the U.S. and worked for many guitar companies, including Gibson and Fender, designing guitars and pickups. If you could find him he'd also build the original Bill Lawrence pickups for you by hand. Rumor is the ones his partner was selling under his name were inferior.
It seems that in recent years, due to the internet, more people have become awars of how to contact the man Bill Lawrence to get the L-500 and XL-500 pickups. Since it seems these are the "real" pickups, it's been tapping into billlawrenceusa's business, and there have been lawsuits to stop Bill lawrence the man from producing the pickups, or more specifically, to stop using the name Bill Lawrence.
Technically, neither is a "fake" Bill Lawrence, since the two companies are fighting over who owns the name. Who makes the better one? I went with the man Bill Lawrence. His web site is very technical, Gibson and Fender trusted him to design products, it's kind of like purchasing a PAF pickup that was built by Seth Lover himself, or buying the Duncan Seth Lover model.
Bill Lawrence is a very small company now, since he is working for Fender. I called him up two weeks ago and spoke to his wife Becky to order some pickups, She was extremely helpful and knowledgeable.
The Bill Lawrence USA isn't a piece of junk, if you like it keep it. Not many people have actually compared the two side by side, but if you've got $50 to spare I'd check out the Bill Lawrence one.
