"Tommy Bolin's Les Paul had to go. The first black Stratocaster ever made had to go." Joe Bonamassa gives an update on the Nerdville guitars following the L.A. fires and lays out his plans for handling future catastrophes

Joe Bonamassa was at a restaurant with a friend on January 8 when he received the wildfire evacuation alert for Laurel Canyon neighborhood where he lives and maintains the massive guitar collection in his Nerdville West Museum of Antiquities and Collectibles.

"We canceled the dinner order and flew up here in the dark," Bonamassa tells Guitar Player, nothing that the pair has to use inbound back routes rather than the main roads that were being roadblocked by the police. Evacuating all 350 guitars and 300 amplifiers would be impossible, but Bonamassa says that "I've had a plan for 10 years, since I lived here." Between his Range Rover and his friend's Chevrolet Tahoe, however, they were able to take about 40 guitars and two of the amps to a storage locker Bonamassa maintains in North Hollywood, and "hope for the best" for the rest of his collection, which did survive.

"You gotta have a plan, and don't be married to the outcome," Bonamassa explains. "What I don't subscribe to is it's just stuff. It's stuff, yeah, but this isn't just stuff. This is American history I've collected and I'm in charge of, so I take that very seriously." Value and significance, he adds, were the criteria for what guitars were taken out of the fire's path.

"Tommy Bolin's Les Paul had to go," Bonamassa says. "The first black Stratocaster ever made had to go, the Broadcaster, the 10 sunburst Les Pauls that were up there had to go. They're well-known guitars in the vintage guitar community; that would be a pretty major event if 10 sunburst Les Pauls burned up in a single evening, under my watch. So we got 'em in

"I knew this day was coming; you just never know when. Laurel's been '71 years without a major fire. But we're still here, we survived."

And, he's quick to add, "Don't feel bad for me. Forty people died, let's start there, in two days — some died with a garden hose in their hand, trying to protect their entire world. We were lucky." Bonamassa adds that he remains furious at the arsonists who set some of the blazes. Bonamassa posted about his situation that week, using a picture of the Nerdville West marquee with the message, "It's not in my hands anymore. A very hard place to be as a curator. It's my lifetime of work. I knew this day would come eventually but just not today..." and added "a major thanks to the firefighters and fire responders for giving it their all these past few days."

In the wake of the fire, and also expecting issues with his home insurer as well as Lloyd's of London, which handles the gear collection, Bonamassa is looking at a new storage scenario for the equipment. "Nerdville West...had a good run. Within the next three months we're building out a new storage locker for me in North Hollywood. Ninety percent of the guitars will be off-site. I'm gonna leave the amps 'cause I don't have space for them, then we'll reassess whether I sell some off or just take my chances.

"It is what it is," he adds. "It was an eye-opening experience for me to go, 'Okay, maybe this notion of having a museum with one of the biggest and most expansive guitar collections in the world in the Hollywood Hills, maybe that's not in my best interest or anybody else's best interest."

Bonamassa did pull one of the Les Pauls and an amp out of storage for the Grammy Awards' Premiere Ceremony, where he performed Bobby Bland's "Twenty-Four Hour Blues," which he recorded for his latest album, 2023's Blues Deluxe Vol. 2. "It was a great day," Bonamassa recalls. "I was very honored to do that. And the band was, like, Lee Sklar, Dean Parks. One of the coolest things was a lot of the string players and horn players were Hollywood Bowl alumni, so they played on the (2023) gig at the Hollywood Bowl; 'Yeah! You were at the Hollywood Bowl! Remember how I played too loud over there? That'll be the same tonight.'"

The euphoria over the performance, meanwhile, mitigated any disappointment over losing to Ruthie Foster for Best Contemporary Blues Album, making Bonamassa still Grammy-less after four nominations. "I'm agnostic about that," he says. "It's not gonna move the needle.

"The worst thing about not winning is you have to talk your friends off the ledge on your behalf; 'Oh, this is bullshit! You should've...' And I'm like, 'It doesn't matter. You know how many Grammys Led Zeppelin has? None. You know how many Grammys Sammy Davis Jr. has? None. Guns N' Roses? None. The list goes on and on and on and on. The only thing to do with Tom Petty that won a Grammy was the people who did the video for 'Last Dance With Mary Jane.' I really don't care. If they had not asked me to play, I probably wouldn't have gone."

Bonamassa — who recently dropped "Fortune Teller Blues," a single with Sammy Hagar — makes a guest appearance on Dave Mason's upcoming album A Shade of Blues, out March 21/ He begins a U.S. tour on Jan. 19 in Seattle, with U.K. and Irish dates during the summer as well as shows with the all-star Black Country Communion. Bonamassa says there will be more singles, too, before he releases his next album.

"We'll be dropping singles for the next probably seven, eight months, then a full-length probably at the end of the year," he says. "That's the new paradigm. I know how streaming works and the algorithms; if you release everything at once the album comes out of the gate strong and dies quick. If you keep the singles coming it reaches more people, and that's the goal for any music, to get it out to as many people as you possibly can. Do I like it? No. But do I have a choice? Absolutely not. So it's a means to an end."