Story of the song: Rikki Don’t Lose That Number by Steely Dan

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Donald Fagen and Walter Becker with the jazz-rock outfit in 1973 (Alamy)

Steely Dan’s “Rikki Don’t Lose That Number” is hooked on the two-note bassline of Horace Silver’s jazz classic “Song for My Father”. Silver sometimes believed that the eight-bar phrase of his celebrated jazz piece was “a telepathic impression given to me by an out-of-body composer from another level, from the spirit world”.

Premiered at the It Club in Los Angeles in 1963, “Song for My Father” soon made its way onto vinyl and into Donald Fagen and Walter Becker’s extensive record collections. Preparing material for the brilliant, quirky Pretzel Logic in 1973, the duo blew off the dust for “Rikki Don’t Lose That Number”, one of the band’s best-loved songs and a Billboard Top Five. The song murmurs in on a marimba-style instrument called a flopanda, played by Victor Feldman, before pacing confidently across a considered take on the Silver riff.

In 1993, Silver put his own lyrics to “Song for My Father” but, remarkably, remains uncredited as co-composer of “Rikki Don't Lose that Number”. Steely Dan’s masterwork has since been covered by artists as diverse as Tom Robinson and Hank Marvin. “We don’t sing [“Rikki”] anymore,” Fagen quipped in 1995. “No one remembers what the lyrics meant.”