Several months The producers The Simpsons They were confused when they heard Hank AzariaThe latest voice recording for Springfield. For 36 years, he’s brought to life a fair few of Springfield’s animated characters, from Chief Wiggum to Comic Book Guy to Moe the bartender. But now, all those voices were just a little… croaky. Azaria had a pretty good idea what was wrong, but was vague in his explanation. “We’re working on it,” he said, eventually re-recording some of the lines.
At issue is Azalea’s current obsession, the project he’s poured so much of his time and energy into, the most heartfelt endeavor he’s undertaken in his career to date. At 60 years old, the six-time Emmy winner is hustling in the city of the American Dream, ready to prove it overnight as his own frontman. Bruce Springsteen Cover band. “My whole life is about sharing vocal impressions,” Azaria says late on a scorching hot June afternoon. “In some ways, this is the ultimate for me.” He’s sitting in a plush Upper West Side apartment that occupies one floor of a building facing Central Park. At 60, Azaria is impressively muscular, his biceps appropriate for ’80s blues concealed under a black V-neck T-shirt. On the wall opposite him hangs a huge canvas by pop-surrealist painter Kenny Scharf, a cartoonish, alien landscape.
Hank Azaria and the EZ Street Band First official gig The show opens August 1 at Le Poisson Rouge in Manhattan, with net proceeds going to social justice charities. He has other venues lined up for the fall, and hopes to eventually expand the project to fill a 2,000-seat theater. “I consider it a play,” he says. “I’m telling my own story, but I’m still Bruce’s character. It’s a performance, but I’m not a Bruce impersonator.”
Azaria spent months stretching his vocal cords, at one point injuring them, to imitate Springsteen. He even tried to master his own speaking voice, which he describes as “Frank Pantegheri’s The Godfather Azaria originally planned to form a band around keyboardist Adam Cromelow and perform a one-off show in front of “everyone I’ve ever known” at his 60th birthday party, held downtown in April at City Winery. “I was kind of nervous about turning 60,” Azaria says. “I thought, ‘What would be fun?'” He told friends the entertainment for the party would be “a great Bruce Springsteen cover band,” minus the frontman.
Although he continued to act on Broadway throughout his career and was nominated for a Tony Award for his performances there, Spamalot In 2005, Azalea nearly suffered stage fright before a concert. “I was so nervous,” he said. “I was more nervous that day than I’d ever been for any show in my life. I’ll be honest with you, I had a panic attack. I thought, ‘What am I doing? This is weird. This is weird!’ And then I had a full-blown panic attack. I was sweating and I actually threw up. I’d never thrown up from nervousness in my life.”
Once he got over his fear and took to the stage, Azaria and the band hit it off, and he was so enthralled by the experience that he decided to stick with it. “I was sitting here the Monday after the party,” he recalls. “That Monday morning, I had two acting jobs. I turned them down, and I spent the whole morning thinking about my next job with the band.”
The Simpsons It’s a very stable and lucrative job that gives Azaria almost complete freedom in his career, as well as funding his charity work and, more recently, his EZ Street Band. I stopped speaking. He fought back against playing the role of Kwik-E-Mart owner Apu and the other non-white characters on the show, and has since apologized at length and multiple times for taking those roles in the first place. Those issues aside, he’s well aware of his good fortune. “I’m the luckiest guy in show business,” he says. He jokes that if a young actor asks him for advice, he’ll reply, “Go do an animated show that’s been running for 36 years, and don’t worry about anything.” (He’s confident that season 36, currently gearing up for the fall, won’t be the last: “If we were to end, they’d probably make a big fuss about, ‘This is the last season,’ so I think we’d know.”)
So why did Azalea take the surprising liberty of singing “Jungleland” onstage? He’s been a recovering alcoholic since getting sober around 2006, and when he started drinking at 14, Springsteen was his musical hero. “Nostalgia takes on a different meaning when you’re over 40,” Azalea says. “It becomes a painful longing…. A lot of the work I do now in recovery is with adult children of alcoholics and dysfunctional families, and there’s literally an inner teenager in there. My inner teenager was so excited about all of this: ‘I can be blues!’ And, of course, he threw up. But I felt it was him who was being guided through all of this, and it was his joy that was being expressed.” He smiles and almost murmurs, adding, “If that doesn’t sound too weird.”
