Everybody who’s anybody has played the Hollywood Bowl. Louis Armstrong and Ella Fitzgerald, The Beatles, The Doors, Jimi Hendrix, The Beach Boys, Frank Sinatra, Elton John, and the list goes on and on.
And anyone who had a ticket to one of those shows sat on the wooden benches that made up its general admission seating.
Now, Fender, the company we can thank for inventing the electric guitar, has put one of its custom shop heavyweights, Yuriy Shishkov—who’s built guitars for everyone from Jimmy Page of Led Zeppelin to Paul Stanley of KISS—on the project of a lifetime.
Shishkov has produced a limited run of Front Row Legend Esquire guitars, built using 100-year-old reclaimed Alaskan yellow cedar wood from the Hollywood Bowl’s actual seating.
Styled after the single-pickup precursor to the classic Telecaster—a guitar made famous by axe-men like the Stones’ Keith Richards and Jersey’s finest Bruce Springsteen—the guitars will retail for $12,000 apiece.
The best part? Each guitar will sport an original seat number (see picture, left) on its face to add to its one-of-a-kind nature.
The guitars’ patina is also all-original, as the boards used to create them feature dings, cracks, bolt holes, weathering, and other imperfections that the usual flawless guitars might not (that is, until you pull a Pete Townshend).
You’ll have to take one of these babies out for a test drive, whenever your JamStack arrives in the mail.
The guitar is available starting this month and will be on shelves for only one year.
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