by Dana Goodyear
George Stathos, who describes himself as "the tallest Greek you'll ever meet in your life," is the elegant, lugubrious front man for My Greek Wedding Band, an outfit that, until recently, was known to connubially minded Mediterranean New Yorkers as George Stathos and Company. The band decided on the new name around the time that "My Big Fat Greek Wedding," the five-million-dollar movie that features the band's music, had grossed twenty million of the two hundred and fifteen million dollars that it has grossed so far. "The 'My' and the 'Greek' remind you of the movie title—and the 'Wedding,' of course," Stathos said over a glass of retsina at Uncle Nick's in Hell's Kitchen. "When I told some other Greek musicians about the new name, they said, 'That's a terrible name! Why're you gonna use that name?' And I said, 'Well, can you think of a better one?' And they said, 'No—but if you got any extra jobs throw them our way!' "
Stathos, who is six feet three, has dark-gray woolly hair, big ears, and ledgelike cheekbones. He plays the clarinet, which he calls "the folk instrument of Greece," and speaks better Greek than his second-generation parents. For the past fifteen years, the band—clarinet, accordion, guitar, bouzouki, darbuka (an hourglass-shaped hand drum), and female vocalist—has performed seventy to eighty gigs a year, including baptisms, folk festivals, back-yard parties, engagement parties, and weddings. Over the years, Stathos said, more and more clients were asking for modern Greek music played at "rock volume," or, worse, he said, "they were hiring d.j.s." Then one day about nine months ago, Stathos got a call from a musician named Emanuel Kiriakou, who said that he was looking for traditional Greek players to record pieces he had composed for the film. Kiriakou, Stathos, and his band performed some original songs for the "Greek Wedding" score, among them "Tsifteteli" ("Belly Dance"), "Tis Nyfis Ta Vimata" ("The Bride's Dance"), and "Kefi in Katavia." ("Kefi" means "good feeling," and Katavia is an imaginary place with a Greek-sounding name.) Stathos was paid four hundred dollars for each of the five songs that were used. "The movie was so perfect because we got to actually play a classy Greek wedding and play traditional music, without people saying, 'What's that weird Chinese music?' " (Stathos thinks that a clarinet being played too loud through a microphone has this effect.)
Only "Kefi in Katavia" made it onto the movie's soundtrack CD, which also includes songs by a Toronto group called The Greek Wedding Band. "They don't have it trademarked, as I do," Stathos said. "I checked with my attorney." Stathos plans to record and release his own CD as My Greek Wedding Band soon. "My dream is to play Greek music in its purest form for everyone—Greeks, non-Greeks." (A dream he won't speak about for fear of attracting the evil eye is a possible Broadway musical adaptation of the movie, and a CBS sitcom, which is already in the works.) Stathos is think- ing of advertising in American bridal magazines and has taken out a spot in the National Herald, the oldest Greek-American newspaper in the country. But the most visible form of promotion right now is the blue flyers that have been turning up in lower Manhattan, at places like Starbucks, offering the services of the "musicians from the score of the hit movie." "I don't know how those got up there," Stathos said. "I think one of the guys in the band did it. I'm like, 'Don't do that. That's kind of schlocky.' I think it was the drummer—he's crazy. All drummers are crazy. Did you know that?"
Stathos, who used to charge two thousand dollars a gig, now asks for three to five thousand. He is talking to a West Coast manager (actually, his old manager, from the seventies in New York, who is now a distributor for Kronos foods) about playing in L.A.—"high-level gigs for rich Greeks."
Like the band's name, the name of Stathos's fiancée and publicist, Diane Golfinopoulos—formerly Golfin—was re-Hellenized for the Greek moment. (Her grandfather had changed it when he emigrated from Greece.) "Now, with the whole new Greek-identity thing, we're adding syllables back to our names," Stathos, whose grandfather shortened his name from Stathopoulos, said. "Cristo!" he shouted to the waiter. "Cristaki!"
Read more: http://www.newyorker.com/archive/2003/01/06/030106ta_talk_goodyear#ixzz0jeJxaviN
Strange fact :
Appears both on Waterboys' "Dream Harder" 1993 LP & Annabouboula's "Hamam" 1988 LP
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