Thank you. You’ve been a wonderful audience.
We’ve been Rikki & The Lost Numbers.
Thanks for coming and goodnight.
Well my Steely Dan tribute band never really got off the ground did it!
My brother bought Pretzel Logic soon after it’s release in 1974 and Rikki Don’t
Lose That Number was the first track on the album. It was the single and charted at
number 4 on the Billboard Hot 100 of that year.
The song starts with a strange percussive rumbling played on the flapamba – strangely omitted from the single. What’s a flapamba I hear you say ? It looks like a cobbled together marimba or xylophone your eccentric uncle has made out of scavenged parts in his shed at the bottom of the garden. It does have a cool African tribal vibe about it though.
Then we get the simultaneous bass and piano fifths in a catchy almost bossa-like rhythm. Jazz aficionados will immediately recognise this riff from Horace Silver’s Song For My Father which came out in 1964.
We are now into the main verse of the piece. On first listening it seems to be about requited love and someone trying to rekindle a relationship. The Steely Dan conspiracy theorists say otherwise. As Fagen and Becker are well known for their obscurest lyrics some interpret the song as being about drugs. Number is marijuana, send it off in a letter to yourself a way of distributing said drugs and Slow Hand Roll code for shooting up heroin.
This was all disputed by the songwriters. Fagen met an old flame from college, Rikki Ducornet, who is now a writer and academic and did give her his number knowing she was already married. She never called him back. End of story I guess.
Jeff ‘Skunk’ Baxter’s solo and general guitar work throughout is sublime. He would move on to become a Doobie Brother soon after – and that does have drug connotations!
The harmonies on the chorus are perfect and the general feel of the song joyous. It’s easy to see why this became Steely Dan’s best selling single and one of my all time favourites.
If you live in the central Scotland area, an old drummer friend of mine does have a Steely Dan tribute band. Check out Desperate Dan if this is your kind of music.
(Post by John Allan from Bridgetown, Western Australia – April 2026)
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Lots of interesting tidbits in there! A flapamba is a new one for me. As well as the Song for My Father reference. This song takes me back to where I first heard this album. Next door to my own Rikki of sorts. She never had any interest in exchanging numbers!
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Great song! Loved it then, love it now. Funny how Fagen is so oblique at times, people try to read so much into his lyrics even when it’s not there. He says the lyrics tell the story- he went to a party , met a gal he thought was hot named Rikki (as you point out, her full name is known), thought he was scoring but she said she didn’t feel good and left so he gave her his phone number. Story done! Now ‘Peg’ , there’s an interesting story, a wannabe actress he liked but was spurned by, so he kind of made up a world where she’s a b-lister in bad foreign films…
One personal recollection about the song. It was an earworm for me, I was about 8 and my older brother is named Rick. One day I guess I was singing the song to myself and my Mom heard, or at least the ‘Rikki don’t’..and she was furious because she thought my bro must be doing something terrible (mad at him) and I wouldn’t tell her what (mad at me). Now that I think of it, I think I more or less stopped singing unless I was absolutely alone about then.
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While I suspect “Aja” will always remain my favorite album by Steely Dan, I also dig many songs from their earlier albums, and Rikki just is a classic, as far as I’m concerned.
I also happen to have a dear friend who leads a tribute band called Good Stuff, and they most play songs by the Dan. Here’s their rendition of Rikki, captured in early January this year.
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Nice piece John, there was another top guitarist on that track, Dean Parks, who gives a couple of interesting insights in this clip…
https://youtu.be/DnD-RnFLYmQ?si=fvTMjhvLzZ352z-5
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