Steely Dan - “Rikki Don’t Lose That Number”
1974
I doubt I will ever be one of those huge fans of Steely Dan. I may sometimes call them the familiar “The Dan”, because that is what some of us men my age do. But after all these decades of hearing them on the radio and having others rave about them and wanting to enact some sort of you’re either for-the-Dan vs. against-the-Dan barricade, I’ve only bought one album by them and it feels like the right amount of Dan to own. I still think - even after classic rock radio has tried and tried and tried to kill them with overplay - their seventies first run of hits are absolutely brilliant. “Do It Again”? “Reeling In The Years”? Wondrous stuff.
That one album I have by Steely Dan is Pretzel Logic and I scored it for a buck off of eBay years ago. I bought it mostly because: 1) I wanted to check out a Dan album without copping out with an anthology, 2) My research indicated that on the Not Jazzbo Fusion and Still Accessible calculations it might be my best bet, and 3) “Rikki Don’t Lose That Number” is on it. I still remember where I was when I first heard this tune, in my Mom’s car in 1974, she was driving me home on a Saturday morning after a sleepover and had the Top 40 AM radio station on. And yes after all these years I still find it haunting, catchy, a mystery never solved.