“Rikki Don't Lose That Number” by Steely Dan

"Rikki Don't Lose That Number" kicks off Pretzel Logic, Steely Dan's third album, and as a 1974 single it became the biggest hit the band ever had, reaching number 4 on the Billboard Hot 100 that summer. Walter Becker and Donald Fagen wrote it, Fagen sings it, Gary Katz produced and Roger Nichols engineered.

It's also where you can catch the Dan trading bandmates for hired guns. Jim Gordon drums in place of Jim Hodder, Michael Omartian takes the piano bench from Fagen, and session man Dean Parks plays acoustic guitar, with Jeff "Skunk" Baxter on the solo and Becker on bass. Victor Feldman's flapamba intro got chopped off the original ABC single, and that opening riff sounds an awful lot like Horace Silver's "Song for My Father", though Fagen puts it down to a common Brazilian bass line.

Written with AI assistance from RockLists chart data, MusicBrainz and Wikipedia.