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Pretzel Logic is the third studio album by American rock band Steely Dan, released on February 20, 1974, by ABC Records. It was recorded at the Village Recorder in West Los Angeles, California, with producer Gary Katz. The album was the last to be made and released by the group while it was still an active touring band, as well as the last to feature the band's full quintet lineup of Becker, Fagen, Denny Dias, Jim Hodder, and Jeff "Skunk" Baxter (who subsequently left to join the Doobie Brothers), though it also features significant contributions from many prominent Los Angeles-based .
A commercial and critical success, the album's hit single, "Rikki Don't Lose That Number", helped restore Steely Dan's radio presence after the disappointing performance of its previous album. Pretzel Logic was reissued on CD in 1987, and remastered in 1999, to retrospective critical acclaim.
The music on the album is characterized by Vocal harmony, counter-melody, and bebop Musical phrasing, and often relies on straightforward pop music influences. The syncopation piano line that opens "Rikki Don't Lose That Number" develops into a pop melody, and the title track transitions from a blues song to a jazzy chorus.
Steely Dan often incorporated jazz into its music during the 1970s. "Rikki Don't Lose That Number" appropriates the bass pattern from Horace Silver's 1965 song "Song for My Father", and "Parker's Band" features riffs influenced by Charlie Parker and a lyric that invites listeners to "take a piece of Mr. Parker's band." Baxter's guitar playing drew on jazz and rock and roll influences, and on the instrumental cover of Duke Ellington's "East St. Louis Toodle-Oo", he recreates a classic Tricky Sam Nanton trombone solo on pedal steel. On that same track, Becker uses talk box guitar to recreate James "Bubber" Miley's famous plunger-muted trumpet melody. Certain songs on the album incorporate additional instrumentation, including exotic percussion, violin sections, bells, and horns. Victor Feldman played a flapamba solo to introduce "Rikki Don't Lose That Number" on the album, but this intro was removed from the single release upon orders from Geffen Records.
"Charlie Freak" recounts the tale of a vagrant drug-addict who sells his only possession—a gold ring—to the narrator so he can buy a fix, which kills him.
At the end of 1974, Pretzel Logic was named NME magazine's album of the year. It was also voted the second-best album of 1974 in Pazz & Jop, an annual poll of prominent critics published by The Village Voice. Christgau, who created Pazz & Jop, ranked Pretzel Logic number one on his own year-end list, and later wrote that the album encapsulated Steely Dan's "chewy perversity as aptly as its title", with vocals by Fagen that "seem like the golden mean of pop ensemble singing, stripped of histrionics and displays of technique, almost ... sincere, modest."
In Allmusic (1995), Rick Clark gave the album five stars out of five, writing, "On Pretzel Logic Steely Dan most successfully synthesized their love for jazz into their dense pop/rock sound."Clark, Rick (1995). 087930376X, Miller Freeman, Inc.. 087930376X Allmusic's Stephen Thomas Erlewine called the album Steely Dan's "richest" and wrote that Becker's and Fagen's songwriting was "seamless while remaining idiosyncratic and thrillingly accessible." Patrick McKay of Stylus Magazine called the album "superb" and said it found Becker and Fagen "relying instead on crack studio musicians that could realize their increasingly complex compositions". Rob Sheffield, wrote in The Rolling Stone Album Guide (2004) that, when making Pretzel Logic, "Steely Dan's songwriting and Fagen's singing were at their peak of fluid power: The whole album is flawless".
Pretzel Logic has appeared on retrospective "greatest albums" lists. In 1994, it was voted number 67 in Colin Larkin's book All Time Top 1000 Albums, with Larkin calling the album's mix of jazz, R&B, and pop styles "highly inventive" and "greater than the sum of its parts"; it fell to number 292 in the update of the ranking from the year 2000. In 2003, the album ranked 385th on Rolling Stones list of the "500 Greatest Albums of All Time"; it dropped to 386th on the 2012 update of the list. The album was also included in the book 1001 Albums You Must Hear Before You Die.
| Australian Albums (Kent Music Report) | 18 |
| US Billboard Top LPs & Tape | 8 |
| US Billboard 200 | 41 |
| 1974 | "Rikki Don't Lose That Number" (B-side: "Any Major Dude Will Tell You") | ABC 11439 | 4 | US Billboard Hot 100 |
| 1974 | "Pretzel Logic" (3:59 edit) (B-side: "Through with Buzz") | ABC 12033 | 57 |
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