A few months back, the producers of The Simpsons were confused when they heard Hank Azaria‘s latest batch of voice-acting recordings. For 36 years, he’s brought to life a substantial chunk of Springfield’s animated population, from Chief Wiggum to Comic Book Guy to Moe the bartender. Now, though, all of those guys were sounding kind of… hoarse. Azaria knew exactly what was wrong, but kept his explanation vague. “I’m working on a thing,” he said, and eventually re-recorded some of the performances.
The thing in question is Azaria’s current obsession, a project he’s pouring much of his time and energy into, an endeavor as close to his heart as anything he’s done in his career. At age 60, the six-time Emmy winner is getting ready to prove it all night, to sweat it out on the streets of a runaway American dream, to move like a spirit in the night as the frontman of his very own Bruce Springsteen cover band. “My whole life is about sharing vocal impressions,” Azaria says on a searing-hot late afternoon in June. “This, in some ways, is the ultimate of that to me.” He’s sitting in his spectacular Upper West Side apartment, which occupies an entire floor of a building facing Central Park. At 60, Azaria is impressively wiry, with Eighties-Bruce-worthy biceps lurking under his black V-neck tee. On the wall across from him is a huge canvas, an appropriately cartoon-like alien landscape by the pop-surrealist painter Kenny Scharf.
Hank Azaria and the EZ Street Band have their first official gig at Manhattan’s Le Poisson Rouge on Aug. 1, with net proceeds going to his social-justice-themed charitable foundation. He has holds on a few other venues for the fall, and would eventually like to scale up the project to fill 2000-seat theaters. “I think of it as a theatrical performance,” he says. “I’m staying in character as Bruce even though I’m telling stories about myself. It’s a performance piece, but I’m not a Bruce impersonator.”
Azaria has been stretching — and at one point, bruising — his vocal cords for months as he worked to develop his Springsteen impression. He’s even tried to master his speaking voice, which he compares to a mix of “Frank Pantegeli from The Godfather and Scatman Crothers.” Azaria originally assembled his band, built around keyboardist Adam Kromelow, for a one-off performance in front of “everyone I ever knew,” at his 60th birthday party, held downtown at the City Winery in April. “I had feelings about turning 60,” Azaria says, “and I thought, ‘What would be fun?’” He told his friends that a “great Bruce Springsteen cover band” would be the entertainment at the party, leaving out the part about the frontman.
Despite a lifetime of performing, including on Broadway, where he earned a Tony nomination for his work in Spamalot in 2005, Azaria was nearly overcome with stage fright before the gig. “I was so nervous,” he says. “I was more nervous that day than I’ve been for any other performance in my life. I had a panic attack, to be honest with you. I was like, ‘What am I doing? This is insane. This is insane!’ And I had a full-blown panic attack. I was sweating and I actually threw up. I’ve never thrown up from nerves in my life.”
Once he overcame his fear and stepped onstage, Azaria and the band did well, and he found the experience so enrapturing that he decided to keep it going. “The Monday after the party, I was sitting right here,” he recalls. “I got offered two acting jobs that Monday morning. I turned them both down and spent all morning pursuing whatever’s next with the band.”
The Simpsons has been an extraordinarily steady and lucrative gig, allowing Azaria near-complete freedom in his career, as well as funding his charity work and, lately, the EZ Street Band. In 2020, he stopped voicing Kwik-E-Mart proprietor Apu and other non-white characters on the show, and since then he has repeatedly apologized, at length, for taking on those roles in the first place. Those issues aside, he’s well aware of his good fortune. “I’m the luckiest man in show business,” he says. He jokes that if young actors ask for advice, his reply is, “Get on a cartoon show that runs 36 years. And then don’t worry about anything.” (He’s confident that Season 36, currently in the works for the the fall, won’t be the last: “I think we’d know if we were ending, because they’d probably make a big deal about ‘this is the last season.’”)
And why, specifically, has Azaria leveraged his remarkable freedom into singing “Jungleland” onstage? He’s been in recovery for alcoholism since getting sober circa 2006, and back when he started drinking at age 14, Springsteen was his musical hero. “Past 40, nostalgia takes on a different meaning,” Azaria says. “It becomes this aching sort of longing…. A lot of the work I do now in recovery is adult children of alcoholics and dysfunctional families, and your inner teen is literally a thing. My inner teen was incredibly excited about all this. ‘We get to be Bruce!’ And he’s also the one who threw up, for sure. But I felt like it was him that gets channeled in all this, and it’s his joy that gets expressed.” He smiles, and adds, nearly murmuring, “If that doesn’t sound too weird.”
From Rolling Stone US
