Courtesy Frank Sidoris
Frank Sidoris will appear on “Jimmy Kimmel Live” this week with Mammoth WVH.
Wednesday, Feb. 10, 2021 | 2 a.m.
Las Vegas native Frank Sidoris clearly has some sort of musical magnetic force when it comes to the guitar gods of rock and roll. For years he’s been playing and touring with Slash featuring Myles Kennedy and the Conspirators, and on Thursday, Sidoris will play guitar on Jimmy Kimmel’s late-night show with a new project, Wolfgang Van Halen’s Mammoth WVH.
“The solar system of bands I am associated with, it’s so crazy how tight-knit it all is,” Sidoris says on this week’s Sun on the Strip podcast.
A little more than five years ago — on the same day Slash told his group that Guns N’ Roses would be reuniting for a tour — Sidoris got a call from Wolfgang Van Halen about possibly jamming with this new band. The Vegas guitarist has been going back and forth between the two groups since then and had the chance to spend time with Wolfgang’s famous father Eddie Van Halen, who passed away in October after a long battle with cancer.
“Playing guitar in front of one of the guitar players is definitely nerve-wracking,” Sidoris says. “If we were playing for a week, Ed came down three out of the five days we jammed and he was just the best. He’s such a good father, too. I just liked watching him and Wolf hang.”
Sidoris grew up enveloped in the Vegas entertainment industry. His father, Frank, worked in casinos and his mother, Angela, was a showgirl and dancer who now produces several shows on the Las Vegas Strip.
“Anything in Vegas showbiz, we were probably there,” he says. “As I was playing guitar, before I ended up doing it as a professional, I was a stagehand at the Flamingo and the V Theater. It’s just something I was always attracted to.”
He came to a crossroads in his burgeoning artistic career when he had to choose between playing in the Cirque du Soleil “Viva Elvis” production at Aria or joining the rock band The Cab for a cross-country tour.
“It was a really interesting back-and-forth to make that decision. Do I stay in the comfort of Cirque du Soleil, which is a solid-paying gig with insurance and it’s home? I’d never toured before, so my entertainer and musician [friends] said I’d be crazy not to go. Eventually I did that, and the Elvis show closed a couple months later.”
Sidoris is excited about his future with both rock bands as well as his blossoming Las Vegas-based act with another native musician, Franky Perez. As exciting as life on the road can be, Sidoris says he’d like to create something connected to his hometown.
“It’s something that’s always in the back of my head. Ideally I would create my own show of some sort that would meld what I’m about as a musician and Vegas history, somehow,” he says. “I love this city so much and it would be cool to actually have my name in Vegas history somewhere, on or off the Strip.”
Find this week’s Vegas entertainment news, interviews and more every Wednesday with the Sun on the Strip podcast.
