Dr. Feelgood the Candy Man, better known as former White House doctor Ronny Jackson, has been demoted by the Navy from retired admiral to retired captain for running a pill mill out of 1600 Pennsylvania Ave. during the Trump administration. The Pentagon inspector general found he drank and took drugs while on duty and created a hostile work environment. Well, it wasn’t so hostile for all those aides who were pounding down Xanax and Provigil, prescription or not.

This will hit him fairly hard in the pension check, but Jackson done got hisself elected to the Yew-nited States Congress, so he ain’t doin’ too bad. Hey, remember when he gave Trump glowing physicals, and said he weighed 239 pounds? And stood 6’3″? Yeah, the day-drinking might explain that. And to be honest, who can blame him for it? Might be the only way people could bear working for Trump.

To be fair, Dr. Ronny is hardly the first presidential drug dispenser. The original “Dr. Feelgood” was a guy named Max Jacobson, who gave John F. Kennedy (and lots of celebrities) “vitamin shots” that were laced with amphetamines. He wasn’t the official White House physician, though – they chased Jacobson off, and soon after he was exposed. The doctor John Lennon wrote about, Robert Freymann, administered the same kind of miracle cure to a circle of well-off New Yorkers. Both those guys were stripped of their medical licenses.

Lennon’s 1966 tune wasn’t the first to address the pill-popping craziness of the ’60s, but like the Stones’ “Mother’s Little Helper,” they usually took a cautionary tone. Lennon might have been the first to treat the issue satirically, with some help from McCartney on the bridge. The song was recorded with the rest of the “Revolver” LP, but appeared in North America on “Yesterday and Today,” remembered in the U.S. for its infamous “butcher” cover.

This song is what the meeting between Donald Trump and Elon Musk at Mar-a-Lago must have sounded like.

Guitarist and singer Black Joe Lewis was a hot item back in 2009, when he broke out at Austin’s SXSW festival and released the album “Tell ‘Em What Your Name Is!” which included this track. He’s released four LPs since, the most recent in 2018, but he’s still out on the road.

Trump and Biden both won most of the Super Tuesday delegates, but with enough hiccups to give the media something to talk about. Trump lost Vermont to Nikki Haley and picked up only about 75% of the GOP votes cast, while Biden lost American Samoa to some nobody from Baltimore. As a barometer, Samoa leaves something to be desired. They went for Mike Bloomberg last time.

Trump might have found a solution to his money problems: He’s courting Elon Musk, demonstrating, with apologies to Flannery O’Connor and Ernest Hemingway, that the scum that also rises must converge.

Kyrsten Sinema announced that she won’t run for reelection, and there was much rejoicing.

AIPAC intends to spend $100 million this election cycle to primary Democrats who are insufficiently pro-Israel. I have no idea where people get the idea that Jews are some sinister global force bent on world domination.

North Carolina Republicans have nominated for governor a guy who, no shit, believes in lizard people, among a long list of bonkers conspiracy theories.
I have no idea where people get the idea that the GOP is composed of grifters and morons.

If you ever wonder who the GOP works for, this should be a hint: Defunding the IRS is a big priority. The IRS, for its part, announced last week that its sending notices to 25,000 million-dollar earners who haven’t filed tax returns, in many cases for years. And that’s not even counting the Russians.

Interesting news on the labor front. Starbucks has agreed to negotiate with unions, who withdrew their slate of board candidates in response. If there’s no quid pro quo there, the union people are dumber than I think. Meanwhile the Dartmouth men’s basketball team voted to unionize. It’s hopefully a first step toward getting higher education out of the minor league sports business.

The floor’s yours.

Feeling down? I find that there’s nothing like a little ska revival music to brighten my mood.

Today’s exhibit A: the Melbourne Ska Orchestra, an Aussie outfit that shows how well the genre takes to a big-band treatment. The band has been around for more than 20 years, and is part of a global ska underground (there’s a whole Latin-ska contingent out there, too). You’d have to search pretty hard to find another tune that features solos on both steel drum and baritone sax.

The “Get Smart” theme was written by Irving Szathmary, a child prodigy on piano who in the ’30s became an arranger for big bands led by Benny Goodman, Artie Shaw and Jack Teagarten, among others. He was the oldest of six children; his youngest brother was comedian Bill Dana. Szathmary, who was born Isadore Szathmary but changed his first name while still in his teens, demanded his brother adopt a stage name because “Don’t you know that I have a reputation in music?”

Dana was the one who introduced him to TV producer Leonard Stern, who commissioned Szathmary to write a theme song for the sitcom “I’m Dickens, He’s Fenster.” That show was cancelled after one season, but Stern tapped Szathmary two years later for the theme to his James Bond parody. He went on to score every episode of “Get Smart.” When the show ended he retired to Malta, where he died in 1983.

Anti-Putin Russian dissident Alexei Navalny was buried in Moscow on Friday, a ceremony that drew thousands of chanting spectators despite threats of arrests and heavy police presence. News reports mentioned that his coffin was lowered into the grave to the theme from “Terminator 2: Judgment Day.”

“He thought ‘The Terminator 2’ was the best film in the whole world,” Navalny’s spokeswoman, Kira Yarmish, said. For those who might miss the significance, at the end of the 1991 James Cameron film, the cyborg played by Arnold Schwarzenegger sacrifices himself to save the future. The theme plays as he’s lowered into a vat of molten metal and destroyed.

The theme was composed by Brad Fiedel, a former keyboardist for Hall & Oates in the ’70s who moved to Hollywood and wrote music for dozens of movies and TV shows in the ’80s and ’90s. He got his big break when Cameron hired him to score the first “Terminator” film in 1984.

The “Terminator 2” theme has been covered several times, and you can hear for yourself why it’s perfect for a Russian funeral ceremony.

England’s Northern Soul movement is a fertile field for soul music fans looking for songs they haven’t heard a thousand times. The genre took root around 1970 in northern England, where the taste for Motown’s classic mid-’60s period lingered into the funk era. The term was coined by a London record shop owner who told his employees that Northerners, distinguishable by their distinctive accent, only liked older records, or “northern soul.”

Fans preferred songs with a fast, danceable beat. The Four Tops’ “I Can’t Help Myself (Sugar Pie Honey Bunch)” has been held up as an exemplar of the form, but it’s not considered a Northern Soul record – because it was a hit. From the first, devotees prized overlooked singles that DJs at large dance venues “discovered” on trips to the U.S. “What,” voted one the top 25 Northern Soul songs of all time, is a good example.

Judy Street was singing in a hotel lounge act in Phoenix, Ariz., in 1968 when Hollywood actor Conrad Bachmann heard her and decided to play music impresario. He took her to Los Angeles and hooked her up with arranger/producer H.B. Barnum, at the time the musical director for Gladys Knight and the Pips. Barnum recorded Street singing two of his own compositions. “You Turn Me On,” a slow torch song, was the A-side. He had written the uptempo “What” for Melinda Marx, Groucho’s daughter, three years earlier; Street covered it for the B-side. Bachmann knew nothing about promoting a record, though, and the single went nowhere. Only 1,000 copies were pressed.

The song was revived five years later by DJs at the Wigan Casino, a Northern Soul hotbed in Greater Manchester, where it quickly became a crowd favorite. It proved so popular that it was re-released in 1977, then again in 1982 after it was covered by Soft Cell, whose version went to No. 3 on the UK singles chart.

In the best Northern Soul tradition, Judy Street had no idea the song had become popular across the pond. After her recording session she sang with a Disneyfied pop group called the Swinging Society for a couple of years, then returned to the lounge circuit in California before moving to Nashville, where she played drums and sang in local bands and gave music lessons. She once met a couple of Brits who told her about the Soft Cell hit, but it wasn’t until she googled herself on the internet around the turn of the millennium that she learned the full story. It led to a career revival of UK concerts and a couple of albums, the most recent from last year.

Guest post by Nathan Arizona

What? Lana Del Rey in the news again? Go figure.

And not just because she got knocked down in Taylor Swift’s private box during a post-game Super Bowl celebration. Karma? For a time she was wearing a loser San Francisco 49ers shirt.

The new news is about what made her famous in the first place – music. She has just released a cover of Irving Berlin’s “Blue Skies” that’s featured on the soundtrack for the series “The New Look” on AppleTV+.

It’s not quite the version your great-great-grandmother shimmied to. This one is moody, kind of dark, a little weird. Of course it is. Blue skies are usually cheerful but Lana reminds us that “blue” can also mean sad. As usual, she gets a lot of help from regular producer Jack Antonoff.

“Blue Skies” is one of Berlin’s most popular tunes, and there are a lot of versions to choose from. The producer of a 1926 Broadway show called “Betsy” got Berlin’s last-minute approval to use the new tune when songs by a couple of nobodies named Rodgers and Hart weren’t cutting it. “Blue Skies” got 24 ovations on opening night. Well, that’s what I heard. The show flopped anyway, but the story was all about Irving Berlin’s new song.

“Blue Skies” was covered by Bing Crosby, Bennie Goodman, Jo Stafford, Dinah Washington, Doris Day, Count Basie and, well, just about everybody. It was used in the first full-length movie with synchronized sound, “The Jazz Singer.” Al Jolson sang it in, uh, blackface while looking dreamily into his mother’s eyes.

Here’s Lana. There’s nothing wrong with your speaker. It just starts off that way for a few seconds.

Brent Spiner, better known as Data, sang it in the movie “Star Trek: Nemesis” during the wedding celebration for Riker and Troi. Data’s just a tad shaky on the first few notes before his circuits kick in.

Spiner was a good singer and has released a well-regarded album of standards called “Ol’ Yellow Eyes Is Back.” He also sang in the Stephen Sondheim musical “Sunday in the Park With George” before starting his TV career and in 1997 played John Adams in a revival of the musical “1776.”

Ella Fitzgerald also had a go at it. She’s not sad or weird, just great.

Lauren Boebert, the Colorado Carpetbagger, had barely finished tweeting something about the Biden crime family when news broke that her 18-year-old son was arrested on 22 charges related to a string of vehicle break-ins and thefts. Kudos to the writers of the Republican Cinematic Universe for the comic relief.

Randy Newman named his 1977 album after this tune, which features guitar work by Glenn Frey and Joe Walsh. “Little Criminals” was the highest-charting LP of his career, topping out at No. 9 on the Billboard 200.