Pancake Breakfast offers something different for music audience

Galloping onto the Sisters Folk Festival stage like a herd of happy horses, comes the rollicking Pancake Breakfast, a nine-member ensemble party band recalling the early days of Oingo Boingo and The Tubes.

Effervescent and impossible to deny, they blasted though a fast and furious set, testing the load bearing limits of the wooden backyard platform at Angeline's Bakery. With their cheap, cardboard stage decorations and fun props, Pabst Blue Ribbon beer cans and impromptu visual aids, the show resembles a crazily beautiful frat-house celebration.

It's an enticing concoction of musical mayhem, a little cabaret, a little vaudeville, and a dose of the Grand 'Ol Opry. This is what one refers to as the full "Pancake Breakfast Experience."

The band is the singular creation of singer/songwriter Mike Midlo and has evolved and mutated over a very short period of time.

"I want us to be known as the world's greatest campfire band. To have a live-show feel. We play every song, every note, like it's the last time we'll ever play, and that energy blasts out into the audience," Midlo said.

They all hail from rural White Salmon, Washington and have been together less than a year.

"A year or so ago I had quit my job and just went out to the barn and started playing songs for the dogs, strumming the guitar, with no intention of ever playing live," Midlo said.

"Friends kept telling me that I should record and play this stuff for an audience. It was crazy, these were songs I made up out in the garden. People started asking if they could join the band and it kept growing. I named the band Pancake Breakfast because it was the happiest thing I could think of."

Midlo tends to write and play simple folk sing-alongs and ballads. A four-girl chorus aptly named The Pancake Breakfast Singers provides backup vocals and choir moments interrupted by an occasional tap-dance or patty-cake session. The gang ripped through their short set, exchanging a wide array of musical instruments, from trumpets, guitars, castanets, a tambourine, and even New Years Eve noisemakers. In this frenzied idie-folk band, no amount of cooks will ever spoil the broth.

"I really have a love for the old Mexican folk songs and Dylanesque beat poetry and try to bring that nostalgic flair to the routine," Midlo said. "The band keeps adding things every gig we have.

"I picked people that I like hanging out with, and am amazed to find these incredible talents I never knew they had. Julie, one of the Pancake Breakfast Singers, is classically trained. Who knew?"