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By AMY KENNY
Staff Writer

Imagine every warm summer night you've ever spent on a deck, fuzzy-happy-drunk, with good friends and a stack of even better CD's. Shaker is the soundtrack to all those nights.

Fitting then, that on one of the last good nights of August, as a smoggy haze filters lazily through finger-paint-coloured lanterns in the heat of the back patio at London's Call the Office, Shaker's the band to see the month out.

The Kitchener-Waterloo four-piece takes the bar's notoriously cramped stage in a mess of bellbottoms, shaggy hair, polyester shirts, and an energy that scorns the intense heat of the Office's tiny interior.

Singer/guitarist Dan Brooks, guitarist Steve Labine, bassist John Dolinar (all 24) and drummer Tom Dolinar (29) have a 10:30 slot before Hamilton's The Marble Index, but rip through a 9-song set like they're opening for the Stones...just don't mention that to them. It's still a bit of a sore spot (you sit tight -we'll get to that later).

Mid-set, Brooks leans forward into the mic. "Is it hot in here or what?" he asks. "I think it's just yooooooouuuuu!" a female voice screams out. "SHAKE IT SHAKER!" follows another.

Maybe the Shaker boys hear this. Maybe not. It's hard to tell. They're grinning and rocking out, replete with flashy leg kicks...but then again, they've been grinning and rocking out to the Nth degree since the first chunky note dripped classic rock nostalgia from the amps half an hour ago. You get the feeling this is how they play whether in a living room or a packed club. This is no same-old, same-old rock radio outfit. This is old-school 70's rock refreshed. Different, but familiar. Rock done real. Done right.

"I think there's a new wave of rock-and-roll finally coming around again," says Tom. "It's positive. The guitar rock wasn't there for years and all of a sudden there's this new birth of old 70's-kinda-sounding guitar rock-and-roll and we're lucky to be a part of it, and that it seems to be working." Though they've only been together in this incarnation a little over a year, Shaker's been a long time coming. While Brooks and Labine met early on in high school, Labine's move to Barrie halted their casual jam sessions until the summer of 2001, when the two ran into each other at an Oasis concert in Montreal. Brooks was there with John, while Labine had won tickets and a private plane to the show through a Barrie radio station.

The three of them hooked up after the show to party, Labine eventually winged off home on his personal prize jet, and Brooks and John crashed in Quebec before heading to Toronto, where they were joined by Tom for another Oasis show the following night.

Strangely enough, by the grace of radio contest odds, Labine won a second set of free seats directly behind his three future bandmates, and the four of them chatted it up all night in the Molson Amphitheatre's 300's. A couple weeks later at a club in Kitchener, by fluke, John again ran into Labine -who was down from Barrie visiting someone else- and asked him to join a band with himself and Brooks. Labine accepted and had a short-lived stint drumming before he switched to guitar ("This A&R guy from Universal said 'yeah you guys are great except the drums suck' so...uh...we figured it was time to get a better drummer"). In 2003 they asked Tom, who had drummed in a whack of other Ontario bands, to take over as drummer.

Bam. There you have it. Unarguably the best thing to come out of the Gallagher brothers' reign of 90's whinedom, however inadvertent it may have been.

That summer (2003), the all-new Shaker entered and swept seven Battles of the Bands, including one infamous contest where the alleged first prize was a spot opening for the Stones during Toronto's SARS Stock.

Though they won the contest, the shady company behind it candy-assed out at the last second citing difficulty with promotion rights, and cancelling the opening slot. They "compensated" the band with unlimited recording time at a sketchy studio in Toronto -which ended up being useless.

"When we decided to use the studio time we had this guy that had been in the business for 20 or 30 years," Labine says. "So he's been around and he comes to the studio and we're this eager bunch and it was a nightmare. We spent fourteen hours one day and got nothing done."

Since that ordeal, Shaker's taken recording into their own hands and out of their own wallets. Because the Dolinar's currently live in Kitchener, while Brooks and Labine are in Toronto, it's cost them $5000 and four months to get six tracks recorded between Toronto's Chemical Sound Studios and producer Steve Payne's home studio.

The resulting self-titled EP features four of the six recorded tracks -"Sort It Out", "Hangin' Around", "So Long" and "The Jig is Up"- and if mastering and printing go as planned, should be available sometime in October. "How do I get my hands on this?" you ask? Order it at www.shakerworld.ca, hit up selected record stores in Toronto and Kitchener-Waterloo, or get your asses out to a show and buy one there. Trust me -this fall, when the days get shorter and the deck lanterns come down, you'll be glad to have the soundtrack to summer in your stereo.