A few months back, the producers of The Simpsons they went crazy when they heard Hank Azaria’s latest recordings playing vocals. For 36 years, he has played a wide variety of characters in Springfield, from Chief Wiggum to Comic Book Guy to Moe the bartender. Now, however, those guys all sounded like… Azaria knew exactly what was wrong, but his explanation was unclear. He said: “I’m working on something, and he finally recorded some of the plays.
The thing in question is Azaria’s current desperation, a project he spends most of his time and energy on, an endeavor as close to his heart as anything he has done in his career. At 60 years old, the six-time Emmy winner is getting ready to pack it all night, sweat it out on the streets of the runaway American dream, walk like the wind in the night as the leader of his Bruce Springsteen cover. group. “My whole life is to speak in other words,” Azaria said one hot afternoon in June. “This, in some ways, is the end of that for me.” He lives in his beautiful Upper West Side apartment, which occupies an entire floor of a building overlooking Central Park. At 60, Azaria is remarkably lean, with Eighties-Bruce-worthy biceps lurking beneath his black V-neck tee. On the wall across from him is a giant canvas, a suitable alien-like landscape created by pop-surrealist artist Kenny Scharf.
Hank Azaria and the EZ Street Band have their first official gig at Manhattan’s Le Poisson Rouge on Aug. 1, and the proceeds go to his fair charity. He is holding a few more venues for the fall, and would eventually like to expand the project to fill 2,000 theaters. “I think of it as theater,” he says. “I’m always in Bruce’s character even though I’m telling stories about myself. It’s part of the process, but I’m not a Bruce impersonator.”
Azaria had been stretching — and at one point, crying — his vocal cords for months as he worked to develop his Springsteen impression. He even tried to master his speaking voice, which he compared to a mix of “Frank Pantegeli from The Godfather and Scatman Crothers.” Azaria initially assembled his band, which was built around keyboardist Adam Kromelow, for an impromptu performance in front of “everyone I’ve ever know,” at his 60th birthday party, held at City Winery in April. Azaria says: “I had a feeling that I was going to be 60 years old, and I thought, ‘What would it be good for?'” He told his friends that ” the loud Bruce Springsteen cover music” would be the entertainment at the party, leave that part out. about the person in front of me.
Although he has spent his entire life performing, including on Broadway, where he received a Tony nomination for his work in Spamalot in 2005, Azaria almost succumbed to stage fright before the festival. He says: “I was very scared. “That day I was more nervous than I have been for any game in my life. I was scared, to be honest with you. I was like, ‘What am I doing? This is nonsense. This is nonsense!’ And I was completely shocked. I was sweating and I started throwing up. I have never been so disappointed in my life.”
Once he got over his fear and got on stage, Azaria and the band performed well, and he found the experience so moving that he decided to continue it. He remembers: “Monday after the party, I was sitting here. “I was offered two acting jobs that Monday morning. I turned them both down and spent the rest of the morning pursuing whichever group came next.”
The Simpsons has been a steady and lucrative gig, allowing Azaria complete freedom in his work, as well as supporting his charity work and, more recently, the EZ Street Band. In 2020, he stopped talking about Kwik-E-Mart owner Apu and other non-white people on the show, and has since apologized repeatedly, at length, by taking those parts first. Other than that, he knows his luck well. He says: “I am the luckiest man in show business.” He jokes that if young actors ask for advice, his answer is, “Get into a cartoon show that lasts 36 years. Then don’t worry about anything.” ” (He is confident that Season 36, currently in the works for the fall, will not be the last: “I think we would know if we finished, because maybe they make a big deal about ‘this is the last time.’”)
And why, clearly, did Azaria use his incredible freedom to sing “Jungleland” on stage? He has been recovering from alcoholism since he got sober around 2006, and back when he started drinking at age 14, Springsteen was his musical hero. “Forty years ago, nostalgia had a different meaning,” says Azaria. “It becomes this kind of passion…. A lot of the work I do now in recovery is with older children of alcoholics and dysfunctional families, and your inner channel is a real thing. My inner child was very happy about all this. ‘We’ll be Bruce!’ And he was also the one who threw up, really. But I felt like he was involved in all of this, and it’s his happiness that comes out.” He smiles, and adds, almost murmuring, “If that doesn’t make sense, it’s very strange.”
#Simpsons #Actor #Hank #Azaria #Thrilled #Voice #Bruce #Springsteens