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 Pentangeli 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.
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