Larry “Ler” LaLonde is still working out exactly what he lost. Twenty months after the January 2025 Los Angeles County wildfires destroyed his home, the Primus guitarist says the instruments keep coming back to him one at a time.
Speaking to Niels Guns on the “Sixty Scales And The Truth” podcast, LaLonde said he never kept a full inventory, which has made rebuilding the collection a slow process.
“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,” he said (as transcribed by Blabbermouth).
When Guns suggested that the instinct to call it “only stuff” only goes so far, LaLonde agreed, and explained where his priorities landed.
“Yeah, that’s what your brain does,” he continued. “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.”
Part of the loss came down to a decision he made to protect the guitars.
“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,” he explained.
He said he has chosen how to carry it.
LaLonde 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.”
The fires reached LaLonde‘s house in January 2025. Bandmate Les Claypool shared a photograph of what was left on Instagram at the time, showing the property burned down to its chimney.
LaLonde first described the extent of the damage to Guitar World last August, when his count stood at around 58 guitars. The most personal loss was a Stratocaster he had owned since high school.
“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,” he told Guitar World.
The Stratocaster appears on 1991’s Sailing The Seas Of Cheese, Primus‘ first major-label album. Paul Reed Smith later sent LaLonde two guitars after learning he had lost all but one of his PRS instruments.
The fire came during a period of upheaval for the band. Primus were searching for a new drummer after the departure of Tim Alexander, and LaLonde was taking part in auditions while his family looked for somewhere to live. John Hoffman was eventually chosen through an open search. LaLonde has been Primus‘s guitarist since 1989.
