Fender Custom Shop Front Row Legend Esquire Seat No. 1

If you attended a concert at Hollywood Bowl between 1981 and 2013, the bench you sat on might now be part of  Fender guitar history. The vibrations and resonance from that fondly remembered Beach Boys, Tom Petty, Black Sabbath, Radiohead or Stevie Wonder show lurk deep within the pores of this Fender Front Row Esquire, the bodies of which are built from wooden bench seats removed from “The Bowl” in 2014.

Now you can own a piece of Hollywood Bowl history in the form of a Fender Custom Shop guitar crafted from “100-year-old Alaskan yellow cedar”, reclaimed from the original bench boards that have been resonating with the sounds emanating from this legendary venue for decades! 

Built by Fender Custom Shop Master Builder Yuriy Shishkov, every guitar has a different original “seat number” in the body, so each guitar is truly unique. 

“That natural sunlight, the rain and the wind … it just makes it, obviously, look kind of old,” says Yuriy Shishkov, while cradling one of the Alaskan yellow cedar "blanks" sawn from the Bowl benches. “But inside, if you look at this piece, it looks like it just was cut yesterday — but this is about 100 years old!”

Truetone Music has acquired the most sought after of these builds, Seat #1. This is the last of this series, and the only Seat #1 Front Row Legend built by Yuriy, making it a true collectors piece, as well as a bonafide part of music history!