This Michael Jackson Soundalike Went Viral. Can He Become a Star?
📖 Full Retelling
In the 1980s, Alfonzo Jones was a talented dead ringer for the King of Pop and traveled in the same circles. Four decades later, he's ready for his own spotlight
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O ne day around 1980, funk singer Bobby Nunn was striding through a Los Angeles studio when he heard a familiar voice. “Oh, my God. That’s Michael Jackson !” he thought. “I guess they snuck him in there.” At the time, Jackson was pop’s fastest-rising star, having bridged the teeny-bopper mania of the Jackson 5 with mature disco-soul hits on his 1979 solo breakthrough, Off the Wall. For Nunn, working in the same building as Jackson was huge. “After I got into my session and I saw Clay ,” a producer who’d once worked with the Jackson 5 , “I said, ‘Man, why didn’t you tell me you had Michael Jackson?'” Nunn recalls. “He said, ‘That’s not Michael.’” The voice instead belonged to a young Angeleno named Alfonzo Jones, who was cutting his self-titled debut. Radio promoter Joe Isgro, who had close ties with the Jackson family and later promoted Thriller, had signed Jones to his label partially because he sounded like Jackson. He was right. Jones’ “Girl, You Are the One” and “Change the World” placed on Billboard’ s charts when they came out in 1982. Those songs seemed like they would be Jones’ career peak until this past decade, when the singer, who performs as just Alfonzo, was surprised to learn he’d gone viral. Jackson’s fans thirsted to know more about this singer who looked and sounded like the King of Pop (and even released a pre- Thriller album cover that resembled that classic album). Now, he’s readying new music for his newfound fan base, hoping for another shot at the big time. “It’s exciting,” Jones, now 65, tells Rolling Stone, his voice still sounding light and MJ–like after four decades. “I had a feeling that I would get another chance. I didn’t know what year, what time, but I had a feeling. That’s why I never gave up.” Jones’ smile always comes across when he speaks. Atlantic Starr trombonist Jonathan Lewis, who played on Alfonzo, remembers the singer in the Eighties as jovial “with a real mild sentiment about him,” and that still holds true in interviews wi...
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