The Steely Dan lyric Donald Fagen said no one understood: “Take the lyrics more literally”
It’s always been hard to get a handle on just what the hell Steely Dan is going on about in every one of their songs. There may be some hidden meaning or grand story that Walter Becker and Donald Fagen want to tell, but more often than not, it comes down to the fantastic solos on their records rather than them trying to become the jazz fusion answer to Bob Dylan. They still took their craft seriously, and Donald Fagen was convinced that everyone was listening to ‘Rikki Don’t Lose That Number’ wrong.
Then again, there shouldn’t be any wrong or right way to listen to music. Some people might have different interpretations of how they see your music, and by the time you unleash your songs to the public, it’s out of your hands as to what it’s about.
Steely Dan were never ones to be the cagey sort when they were writing lyrics. It’s easy to see a picture every time Fagen opened his mouth, and usually the characters in these pictures were not exactly upstanding members of society. The first song they released, ‘Do It Again’ was the story of a man going back to his gambling ways despite it being bad for him, and that may have blossomed into ‘Kid Charlemagne’, who’s the kind of drug lord no one wants to get involved with.
None of this could be considered uplifting stuff here, so when they decided to actually write something about real relationships, it threw everyone in the loop. Compared to everything else in The Dan’s song catalogue, ‘Rikki Don’t Lose That Number’ might be the most simplistic story that they had ever written, just talking about Rikki trying everything he could to hold onto a relationship with this girl.
That’s not exactly how the rest of the world took it. Steely Dan are the guys that write about dark topics, after all, so that “number” must mean something else. So for the first few months the song received airplay, certain fans thought that this was an allusion to drugs, with the number being slang for marijuana.
Fagen wasn’t looking to go along with his fans, though, telling Classic Rock Stories, “The fact that is that we were referring to a phone number, so I think people should take the lyrics more literally, and it’ll be on the safe side. It’s a very simple love song to a young lady”. If people decided to take it at face value, there was already a sinister bent to it without the drugs.
Throughout the rest of the song, it becomes a little clearer that this guy is already from the wrong side of the tracks. He spends time living it up at this resort, and when he sees a younger woman in his sights, he’s already looking to get her number, possibly in the hopes of being the kind of disaffected lover that far too many people fall in with.
There might be a sexual undercurrent to the song, but this is not meant to be the good kind of sexy. He may not have been looking for a fix like everyone thought, but if you were to see this man in real life, you can imagine the faded aviator shades, the buttoned-down Hawaiian shirt and receding hairline as he talks about being God’s gift to women. Whether he gets high at the end of the song or not, Rikki should be careful not to get a drink thrown in his face at some point.