“The first thing that I grabbed when I was like, ‘We’ve got to get the hell out of here’ was the double-neck that Alex Lifeson gave me”: Primus’ Larry LaLonde opens up on losing his house and nearly all his gear in the devastating California wildfires

In January, as wildfires raged across California, Primus' Larry ‘Ler’ LaLonde was one of the countless individuals and families whose homes were destroyed by the fires, and whose most beloved possessions were lost forever. For LaLonde, this included the guitar gear he had collected throughout the years.

“That’s been one of the craziest components... I haven’t gotten a full count yet,” he divulges in a candid interview with Guitar World.

“The last I looked, I was up to, like, 58 guitars. So yeah, tons. My whole studio of recording stuff… and here’s the dumbest thing I’ve ever done in my life: I had this hard drive, a 12-gig hard drive, just sitting around on the desk. It was just for these situations, and I probably ran past it 20 times while pulling stuff out of the house and into the car.

“I never thought to grab that hard drive. It was just the dumbest thing in the world. I don’t know where that mental block came from because that’s what it was for. So, that’s kind of a bummer. But yeah, that was the craziest thing.”

LaLonde explains how Paul Reed Smith reached out to him and sent him two “amazing” guitars, “because I lost all but one of my PRSs,” to help him replace some of the many instruments that were destroyed.

As for whether there were any guitars lost that were particularly sentimental, LaLonde replies, “There’s one Strat that I had on all the first Primus records, like on Sailing on the Seas of Cheese, that’s the guitar I’m holding in that picture. I had that guitar since high school, and that one was in there [the fire].

“But the first thing that I grabbed when I was like, ‘We’ve got to get the hell out of here,’ was the double-neck that Alex Lifeson gave me. So, there’s some stuff that made it out of the house, but a lot that didn’t. But one that comes to mind that didn’t was that Strat, which I used up until I started playing the PRS.”

Elsewhere in the interview, LaLonde discusses the process of auditioning drummers after the departure of Tim Alexander while he and his family were “scrambling to find a place to live.”

Guitar World's full interview with Larry LaLonde will be published in the coming weeks.