Beyond The Guess Who: The Dice- "Chayla"

This week I tackle a real mystery that took me almost twelve years to crack.

Back in 2010, I was frequently browsing YouTube looking for music by bands from the 1970s and 80s. I would constantly fall down a rabbit hole reading up on all these previously unheard-of bands that predated me.

Among the gems I came across was an 80’s alternative-sounding rock track by a band from Canada. Unfortunately, the video was removed at some point, and all I could remember was that the song was called something like “Shayla”. This got me to a dead end. The only song I could find with that title was an album track by Blondie. Every few years or so, I would revisit my search. Each time, it got more and more irritating. I knew the song existed, but couldn’t seem to find out who recorded it. It was my private version of the infamous “Most Mysterious Song On The Internet” or to cite another example, Tyler Gillett.

Gillett, a California filmmaker, recalled hearing a song when he was younger and could not place it. He went to great lengths, including trying to recreate the song in a studio. Eventually, the entire search became an episode of the podcast Reply All. The song turned out to be “So Much Better” by 90’s singer-songwriter Evan Olson, and Gillett probably slept better at night knowing the mystery had been solved.

I knew my personal mystery song search wasn’t going to be as elaborate. I just wanted to know what the bloody song was!

Since 2010, all I had to go by was the following:

-It was a Canadian band from the 80s that fell into either a college alternative rock or new wave category.

-I recalled that the 45 label pictured in the video had been white with red writing

-The song had been called something like “Shayla”

All of these should have been something to go by, but they seemingly weren’t enough.

I’ve always been obsessed with making playlists, starting with mixtapes as a teen. Eventually, I graduated to Spotify. I was making playlists starting with music from the 1970s and 80s with a focus on Canadian artists. For my research, I was using the 45cat website as a reference. When I started making playlists focused on the mid-1980s a lightbulb went off: “What if I could track down that song?!”

One evening near Good Friday 2022, I was looking through 45cat when I saw a listing for a song called “Chayla” by a band called The Dice on Mercury Records with a June 1984 release date. The label matched the one I recalled seeing on the video years earlier. Surely, this had to be it. Spotify yielded no results, but a Google search brought me to a vintage VHS rip of a music video posted on YouTube. Sure enough, this was it!

This ultimately led me to another question, one I am piecing together in writing this article. Who exactly were The Dice?

Information seems to be limited, but a thorough Google search tells me that the band had its roots in a late 1970s rock band called The Pretty Boys. That group was fronted by one Errol Starr Francis. Born in Jamaica, Francis was the son of a reggae musician. During the 1970s and 80s, he was in a series of rock and R&B bands, one of which was The Pretty Boys (some sources simply call the group Pretty Boy). Eventually, Francis shortened his name to Errol Starr and had a solo career as an R&B singer in Canada, scoring a small string of minor Canadian hits, including a cover of The O’Jays For “The Love Of Money”.

Errol Starr performing on the famous Canadian dance music program The Electric Circus at some point in the late 1980s.

From what I can gather, the story of The Dice proper begins at some point around 1982. The band consisted of Gary Lima (lead vocals/guitar), Trevor Russell (guitar), and Hayden Vialva (drums/percussion). The Ontario-based band toured throughout their home province, eventually releasing a 4-track EP on the Nardem label that boasted famous Canadian producer Daniel Lanois (U2, Peter Gabriel) as an engineer. 45cat also lists a 1983 single titled “The Young and the Wild” b/w “Tired Of Living Like This”. That title seems to be elusive from YouTube, but one of the EP tracks, “Ain’t Gonna Lose No More”, is thankfully present.

More touring followed, including opening for Nash The Slash and The Spoons on the same bill. Eventually, they caught the attention of reps at Polygram which led to them ending up on Mercury Records. “Chayla” was released as the first single from their self-titled debut album. The video gained airplay on both Much Music and MTV, and Discogs lists releases for the single in the US, Germany (on Polydor) and Spain. Opening slots on tours for Billy Idol, Stevie Ray Vaughan, and John Cougar Mellencamp followed.

It seemed like The Dice were gaining momentum, but Mercury instead dropped them, and the band broke up. Lima and Vialva reformed the band in 1993, and an independent EP titled Misbehave was released, but the reunion appears to have been short-lived, and the band disbanded once more. (All Music lists a 1997 release, but I can’t find any info on it, and it’s absent from Discogs).

It seems like an anti-climactic end for a band that deserved better. One assumes they were just another band who got snapped up by a major label that didn’t know what to do with them (this will be a recurring theme here with bands such as The Diodes).

By all accounts, The Dice toured frequently, so they seemed to be a popular opening act. In terms of releases, however, there doesn’t appear to be much of a proper follow-up to Chayla listed. Discogs shows a 12” promo for a track called “Romeo Of The Night”. This is absent from 45ca,t and the song is nowhere to be found online. Their songs are also largely absent from compilation albums, are hard to find on YouTube, and are absent from streaming services.

Chayla doesn’t seem to pop up as a Canadian airplay item. For someone who watched a lot of vintage music video shows for years, it never popped up on Much or Much More Music back when both stations would dust off their video archives. There is a clip of Chayla circulating online with an MTV2 watermark, but that channel never really hit my radar aside from syndicated video shows of more recent material circa 2003.

I’m glad my mystery was solved, but in a better world, Chayla would have been a huge chart hit instead of a song that I couldn’t identify for years. At least it’s available for people to listen to on YouTube again.