Rikki Don't Lose That Number

It opens Pretzel Logic and was released as a single on 25 April 1974, with Any Major Dude Will Tell You on the B-side. It was recorded in 1973. Fagen sang the lead, Becker played bass, Jim Gordon drums, Michael Omartian piano and Dean Parks acoustic guitar, with Victor Feldman on percussion and flapamba and Timothy B. Schmit on backing vocals. Baxter played the electric guitar and the solo. ABC removed the flapamba intro from the single.

Fan theories about drugs or undercover work aside, it is a song of lost love. In 2006 the writer Rikki Ducornet said it concerned her relationship with Fagen at Bard, and Fagen later confirmed that Rikki was a woman he had a crush on in college. The intro resembles Horace Silver's Song for My Father, which Fagen denies, calling it a common Brazilian bass line.

It reached 4 on the Hot 100, the group's biggest hit, and 3 in Canada. The Guardian ranked it eleventh among their twenty best, calling it the only US Top 5 single, it assumed, to feature a flapamba. It was used in the 1989 film Say Anything....