In January, while massive wildfires swept across California, Primus guitarist Larry “Ler” LaLonde joined the long list of people who saw their homes, and decades of cherished possessions, reduced to ash. For him, this meant losing the guitar collection and recording equipment he had built up over the years.
“That’s been one of the craziest components… I haven’t gotten a full count yet,” he told Guitar World recently.
“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,” he recounted.
“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.”
In the wake of the disaster, Paul Reed Smith personally reached out to help. LaLonde recalls receiving two “amazing” guitars from him, “because I lost all but one of my PRSs,” — a gesture that helped begin replacing what had been destroyed.
When asked about instruments with the most sentimental value, LaLonde didn’t hesitate. “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.”
