Tokyo Dream

When we were trying to get the IOU band off the ground in England, it was a very difficult time. We didn't get to play a lot of gigs, and when we played, there would often be Japanese people in the audience. I was always surprised by how much they knew about us. Japan always seemed a mysterious place to me, but people from there seemed to know so much about us. I always wanted to travel to Japan just as a tourist, but I knew if I could ever get the band there, with a bit of luck, we'd do well. During that time Japan was just a distant dream, and when I moved to California, I wrote this as one of the instrumentals for the Road Games project.

In May of 1984, IOU, then consisting of Jimmy Johnson, Paul Williams, and Chad Wackerman, toured Japan for the first time. After the release of Road Games, the four sold out concerts in Tokyo, Osaka, and Nagoya proved an overwhelming success for IOU. Road Games sold very well in Japan. Chad Wackerman and Jeff Berlin backed Allan on the studio track, which featured a myriad of unlikely guitar sounds created by Allan.

(Reaching For The Uncommon Chord, p. 60)