It’s jazz. It’s always jazz. No matter how close they came to brushing up against the pop mainstream, no matter how much they leaned into the balladry of soft rock or adult contemporary, no matter how much their initial twin guitar attack was reminiscent of hard rock, and no matter how similar their lengthy instrumental excursions might have been to progressive rock, everything that misanthropic musical geniuses Steely Dan did always came back to jazz.
It was in their DNA. Walter Becker and Donald Fagen were reserved and taciturn individuals, but they shared a similar intellectual bent and manic love for modal jazz, old-school R&B, and the earliest days of funk. They were unlike any two other people in the entire world, so it must have been fate that they found each other at Bard College during the late 1960s.
It was at Bard that Donald Fagen befriended the wife of one of his teachers, Professor Guy Ducornet. Rikki Ducornet was a writer who had grown up on the college’s campus and graduated from the university with a B.A. in Fine Arts a year before Fagen had enrolled there. The two found themselves at the same party, and despite Fagen’s knowledge of her marriage and her pregnancy at the time, he gave Rikki his number.
Ducornet, as can be culled from the lyrics, never called Fagen. When talking with writer Steven Moore in 1998, Ducornet offered up her own interpretation of the tune: “Philosophically it’s an interesting song; I mean I think his ‘number’ is a cipher for the self.” She wouldn’t be the only person looking for deeper meaning within the song’s lyrics, but Fagen has played these interpretations off, saying that it was simply an unrequited love song.
It’s not known precisely when Fagen turned his spurned advances into the inspiration for a song, but even if he had written the basis for ‘Rikki Don’t Lose That Number’ soon after the event, he didn’t bring it to the band until 1973. Becker and Fagen had attempted to make it as Brill Building-esque songwriters after graduating from Bard and attracted the attention of producer Kenny Vance, who gave them jobs as touring musicians with his ’60s doo-wop group Jay and the Americans. One of Vance’s associates, Gary Katz, appreciated the material being written by Becker and Fagen, and when Katz got a staff producer job at ABC Records, he hired the duo as songwriters for the label.
Katz quickly realised that their material was too technically complex and lyrically obscure for some of the lighter artists on the ABC roster, so he suggested instead that Becker and Fagen create their own group. Before moving out to California with Katz, Becker and Fagen had played with a New York guitarist named Denny Dias, who flew out to join the project. The trio recruited drummer Jim Hodder and guitarist Jeff ‘Skunk’ Baxter to round out the initial incarnation of Steely Dan. However, ABC didn’t think Fagen had the voice or presence to be the group’s frontman, so the quintet became a sextet with the addition of vocalist David Palmer.
By the time the band reached 1974’s Pretzel Logic, Fagen and Becker made it clear in no uncertain terms that they were Steely Dan and that the rest of the members would be joined, or in most cases replaced, by studio musicians. Dias would be retained for the future, but the other members were largely phased out by the time recording sessions for Pretzel Logic began. Baxter would later join the Doobie Brothers, with his solo on ‘Rikki Don’t Lose That Number’ being one of his final contributions to the band. From: https://faroutmagazine.co.uk/the-story-behind-the-song-steely-dans-sly-rikki-dont-lose-that-number/
