If there’s one thing Steely Dan fans love, it’s trying to figure out the meaning behind Walter Becker and Donald Fagen‘s lyrics, which aren’t always particularly…straightforward. Take, for example, one song in particular that’s kept listeners guessing for decades: Their highest charting single of all time, the iconic “Rikki Don’t Lose That Number.”
Released on the 1974 album Pretzel Logic, “Rikki Don’t Lose That Number” peaked at #4 on the Billboard Hot 100 during the summer of that year and remains one of Steely Dan’s most popular songs to this day. But was the tune inspired by a real person named Rikki? And did Rikki end up losing that number? (Spoiler alert: The answer to both of those questions is yes.)
As Fagen revealed in 2006, Rikki was actually a woman named Rikki Ducornet. He met her at a Halloween party at Bard College in 1967, per Far Out, the same school where Steely Dan would form a few years later. At that point, however, they were a band called Leather Canary, and they were hired to provide music for the festivities.
After playing their set, which included a cover of The Rolling Stones’ “Dandelion,” the musicians joined the rest of the party…and that’s when Fagen first saw Ducornet.
Fagen immediately took a shine to Ducornet, but unfortunately for him, she was married and pregnant at the time. Still, that didn’t stop Fagen from (you guessed it!) giving Rikki his number.
Once you know the backstory to “Rikki Don’t Lose That Number,” the lyrics immediately make perfect sense:
You tell yourself you’re not my kind
But you don’t even know your mind
And you could have a change of heart
Rikki, don’t lose that number
You don’t wanna call nobody else
Send it off in a letter to yourself
Rikki, don’t lose that number
It’s the only one you own
You might use it if you feel better…when you get home
Except, Rikki didn’t use that number when she got home, or any other time.
“I was actually a young faculty wife, I was pregnant, and he thought I was cute,” Ducornet explained years later, per the 2017 book Steely Dan FAQ: All that’s Left to Know about this Elusive Band. “So he gave me his phone number, which I lost.”
Ducornet, an artist and writer, didn’t even hear “Rikki Don’t Lose That Number” until years later, as she was living in France at the time of its release. But don’t feel too bad for Fagen: Though he never got a call from Rikki, he got a hit song out of their encounter.
Photo by Michael Ochs Archives on Getty Images
Rolling Stone placed the tune at #4 on a ranking of 84 Steely Dan songs, with David Browne calling it one of Fagen’s “sweetest and most earnest creations.”
“Starting with those simple piano chords, one of the most instantly recognizable intros in pop, it’s also one of their most musically beguiling,” Browne wrote. “The song has the seamlessness of a soft-rock hit from that era but still feels fresh and unbound to any period.”
Even John Lennon was a major fan of the song, as he revealed in a 1974 interview discussing recent hits, saying, “I liked ‘Rikki Don’t Lose That Number’, that was a good commercial record.”
Lennon certainly wasn’t alone. At the time of this writing, “Rikki Don’t Lose That Number” has 135,632,233 streams on Spotify alone.
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