PRIMUS's LARRY LALONDE On Losing 60 Guitars In January 2025 Los Angeles Wildfires: 'I've Been Trying To Have A Positive Attitude'

In a new interview with the Sixty Scales And The Truth podcast, hosted by Niels Guns, PRIMUS guitarist Larry "Ler" LaLonde spoke about losing the guitar gear he had collected throughout the years in the January 2025 Los Angeles County wildfires. He said in part (as transcribed by BLABBERMOUTH.NET): "Yeah, it's weird because it's been, like, slowly just remembering, 'Oh, this…' 'Cause I didn't have everything super cataloged. So slowly you remember, 'Oh, that guitar, that guitar.' … So, yeah, I'm trying to piece them back together. The one thing that I lost a lot of was I had a bunch of Roland synth guitars. And I'd collected them. I had so many. So that's been kind of hard to piece back together, because there's not so many out there."

After Guns noted that LaLonde must have thought at one point, "Oh, it's only stuff," but then again, it's important stuff, Larry said: "Yeah, that's what your brain does. It goes, 'It's only stuff.' Literally if one of the cats didn't make it out, I would have traded… I would take getting all the cats out over any of the guitars, to be honest. So no one lost their life, no one got hurt — as far as our house. So that is the thing. I lost a lot of guitars. And it's a lifetime of collecting guitars… All the ones, some of the expensive ones, you're, like, 'Oh, how can I spend this much on a guitar?' And then you do it."

Asked if the whole experience changed his perspective on owning stuff, like rare and valuable guitars, Larry said: "Maybe not quite as much. Maybe in the sense of, like, 'I'd better put this stuff somewhere safe.' The funny thing is, the reason most of the guitars were in my house is because I had them in storage, and then a friend of mine, who's a drummer, got his storage broken into and they stole his stuff. So I took it all out of the storage space thinking it'd be safer at my house, and apparently it was not… I know [blues-rock guitarist] Joe Bonamassa has all his stuff in a place in Hollywood. That's probably where they should've been."

Larry added: "I try to look at it as… First of all, there's nothing you can do about it. So all you can really do is… It's only how you react to it. So I've been trying to have a positive attitude. And it does suck. It was, like, 60 guitars, tons of pedals. I actually had this big box of pedals that were really expensive stuff, and I was, like, 'Okay, I'm gonna go down and I'm gonna trade this in for something cool,' 'cause it's just stuff I wasn't using. And I had a bunch of stuff I was getting ready to do that with, and it went that way too. But, yeah, it should be a bigger drag than it is. But, like I said, there's nothing you can do about it. It is what it is."

Last year, LaLonde told Guitar World magazine about having his guitar gear destroyed in the fire: "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 went on to say that 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 said: "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 [RUSH] 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."

Back in January 2025, LaLonde's wife, Shane Stirling LaLonde, posted a series of pictures and videos of the fires that ravaged the family's home in the Pacific Palisades neighborhood. "Our home is gone, and so are the homes of every one of our friends and neighbors. I am still in shock, not quite sure what just happened. The first photo is the video confirmation we received that our home was lost. Ours is the second property with the tree still with oranges in the front yard but nothing else," she wrote alongside a video of the destruction.

"We lost everything. It doesn't sink in easily that you have nothing…. It's still sinking in minute by minute. I know we are safe and yes I am grateful, but I can't even begin to be close to grace yet as I can't even comprehend this yet," she added. "Not just the things, but our town, our community. We all no longer have a home, a neighborhood, a school, a community. I am gutted to the core."

In 2025, drummer John "Hoffer" Hoffman joined PRIMUS after beating out more than 6,100 applicants in a global audition process dubbed the "Interstellar Drum Derby".

PRIMUS has already released a few studio songs with Hoffman's drumming, including "The Ol' Grizz" and a cover of DIO's "Holy Diver" from the "A Handful Of Nuggs" EP, which came out in May, and "Little Lord Fentanyl", which was one of two songs released as a seven-inch single last summer.

Earlier this year, PRIMUS hit the road in the U.S. with the "Claypool Gold Tour", banding together three of Les Claypool's beloved outfits for an unprecedented collaborative outing. From May 20 to July 4, PRIMUS, THE CLAYPOOL LENNON DELIRIUM and LES CLAYPOOL'S FEARLESS FLYING FROG BRIGADE united for a 30-stop tour, promising a "mind-melting musical experience" and "fluid show featuring wildly different setlists and surprises."