Life without Joe difficult for Gentle Ben

Mullingar House, Ben Dolan"s famous establishment on Mullingar"s Dominick Street, is a hive of activity.Usually it"s the swarm of young people hitting the tiles at 'Mojo"s', or the craic enjoyed by locals in the bar. But often it"s a gang of tourists, making a pilgrimage to the late Joe Dolan"s spiritual home in his native town.The pub was the subject of a positive review in last week"s Sunday World, but the newspaper"s resident barfly, 'Pub Spy', had one note of criticism for the Mullingar venue.'I cannot believe it. I just cannot believe that there isn"t one, not even one picture of him hanging on the wall,' the anonymous pub reviewer opined, looking for a shrine of Joe memorabilia.'It was a great review,' Ben told Plus this week, 'but I don"t know what he was cribbing about. We have a number of photos of him and discs on the wall. Maybe he just stayed in the bar and didn"t see them!'If it"s memorabilia people are looking for, then Ben himself is a living, breathing monument to the legend that is Joe Dolan. An integral part of The Drifters and the Joe Dolan Band across five decades, Ben admits that life without Joe is difficult to get used to.'It"s still depressing for me,' he admits. 'For years, my life was the band business. It was important for me to remember everything I had to do before a show, so you"re thinking about the business 24 hours a day, seven days a week, worrying about things. And as someone once said to me, "The biggest worries you have are the ones that will never happen".'With so many performances under their belts across the world, he said, Joe, Ben and the band nearly lost sight of the level of Joe"s popularity until his untimely death last September, and the huge outpouring of grief from fans across the country and beyond.'We"ve had thousands of Mass cards sent to us,' Ben continued. 'And we"re still going through them. Joe"s death hit nearly everyone in the country.'You never miss the water until the well is dry. For year"s we"d been doing shows, and you"d see the huge crowds. We were at it so long that we almost lost sight of how big Joe and the band actually were.'After a while on the road, it all just became normal.'But since the Mullingar songster"s death, the volume of tourists, well-wishers and old friends coming to visit Ben in Mullingar House has been phenomenal.For Ben and indeed Joe, it all began in the 1960s, when both of them joined up with The Drifters Showband. Ben had become an accomplishment saxophonist thanks to lessons from Mullingar musician Dinny Hughes, while Joe performed as the band"s lead singer and guitarist.'We played our first date in Castletown Geoghegan on January 10th, 1960, and we were full of beans at the time,' Ben recalled. 'I don"t think any musicians at the time got into showbusiness without a few local jobs.'We started in parish halls and marquees, before moving on to ballrooms and theatres. You"d start with a couple of gigs in places like Collinstown and Delvin, and then before long you"d be wanted in Killucan and Kinnegad. Then someone would hear you there, and you"d get a gig in Enfield, and so on.'It was like ripples in a lake; we got one break after another.'The international success of "Make Me An Island" in 1969 brought a new level of stardom for Ben, Joe and The Drifters, and before long - as key members of The Joe Dolan Band - they jetted off more exotic climes, such as Israel, the Soviet Union and Las Vegas.The trip to Communist Russia in 1978 came in the midst of détente, when relations between East and West were slightly less frosty than the 1950s and "60s.'Things were different in Russia, people couldn"t just go and buy tickets as openly as they can today,' Ben explained. 'Every factory was allotted tickets, and these were bought by people working at various firms. It was kind of like the way things operated in Ireland when the nurses used to get tickets for concerts.'Russia brings back great memories, and we were so surprised that people knew so many of Joe"s songs. Leningrad was a bit more open than other places, and a lot of people spoke English there. Moscow was a little bit different in that sense.'There was silence before the start of every song, and then when Joe hit one of the high notes with his remarkable voice, they"d break out into furious applause. They wouldn"t understand the English, but they still appreciated Joe"s voice.'Ben also has fond memories of one of the band"s final gigs within the borders of the Soviet Union - the city of Kishinev (Chisinau) in modern day Moldova. 'As it happens, we have two girls working here in the pub, and they were born not far outside Kishinev. So that"s a nice coincidence,' he added.If Soviet Russia - where some of Joe"s records were regularly bought and sold on the black market - was a memorable experience, then Ben and Joe had further wonders in store when they hit the United States.'Joe came to me one day and said that he was going to try and get a gig in Las Vegas,' Ben continued. 'We had a show in Dublin one night, and two lads from the Silverbird Hotel in Vegas came to hear us. We made bookings on the same night.'I"ll never forget the day we arrived at the airport in Vegas. The promoters were there to meet us, with two ladies dressed up as leprechauns. We were escorted to the hotel with two police motorbikes, and Andy Devereaux, who was a writer with the Sunday World at the time, came with us to write home about what was happening.'We had a contract for eight weeks in Las Vegas, and we were scheduled to do two shows each night, with a rest on Sundays. It all started very slow, but if you were good, you"d make a name for yourself.'Ben remembers the lengthy Las Vegas Strip as being several miles in length, with plenty of opportunities for an up and coming band. 'The Strip was lined with hotel after hotel, and if you were going to work in the city, you"d have to stay there for long periods,' he said.'We only had a short time to stay there, because we had to go back and honour some dates we had arranged in Ireland. But it didn"t take long for word to get around about Joe and the band. We were very popular with the taxi drivers in the city, and they"d often pick up tourists and recommend us by word of mouth.'It was all down to Joe"s voice, and the quality of it. There has never been another singer and entertainer like him in Ireland.'A keen golfer, Ben joined Mullingar Golf Club in the early 1960s - at the same time as his late brother - and before long it became their pursuit of choice outside of the music world.'Joe was always a very serious man for the rules of golf, and for winning,' he laughed. 'He"d pull you up for anything, even if you touched the ball.'Usually when people are playing golf, and they"re about six inches from the hole, they"d be let away with a gimmie. But Joe would never have any of that. "If you want gimmies, we can go out and play with them tomorrow", he"d say.'The same man would go out onto a stage and do a show, and it"d all be a bit of craic to him. But when it came to a game of golf, he was very competitive!'Ben misses the competitive streak which his brother brought to the greens, but he still enjoys the game himself, testing his clubs on courses around Ireland, and usually in his native Mullingar.Ben"s sons, Adrian and Ray, are heavily involved in the music business; Michael is a farmer by trade, while his daughter Sandra works in the Bank of Ireland. A fourth son, Colin, manages Mullingar House, while Ben"s wife Helen runs the Joli Hair and Beauty Salon at Blackhall, Mullingar.Despite the much-talked-about economic downturn, Ben maintains that the family businesses are booming.'I couldn"t say that we"ve seen anything of the downturn at the moment,' he said. 'We"ve have quite a few people working in the pub and the nightclub, and we haven"t got to the stage where we had to let anyone go.'It"s great to be involved in the entertainment business at times like this,' the Mullingar native remarked. 'No matter how tough times get, people always want to get out and meet others, and will put aside a few extra pound to go out and have a good time.'