This Michael Jackson Soundalike Went Viral. Can He Become a Star?

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 [McMurray],” 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 with Rolling Stone today. When Jones recalls his success, his meetings with Jackson, or even his other love, baseball, it’s with fondness and joy.

He’s also pleased by the comparisons he’s seen others draw between his Alfonzo album and Thriller, such as how each album cover shows the singers reclining in white tuxes. Each features vocalists who sing catchy R&B floor-bangers, like, in Alfonzo’s case, “Your Booty Makes Me Moody,” which he ornamented with brass filigrees and off-the-cuff, MJ-like “woos.” But what got internet sleuths hung up is how Alfonzo reportedly hit shelves months ahead of Thriller.

Musicologist and Roots drummer Questlove remembers seeing Alfonzo on record-store shelves in the early Eighties and dismissing it because it so closely resembled Thriller. He reassessed the album when the website he co-founded, Okayplayer, mentioned the vocal similarities in 2012. “I listened to it, and we had jokes and stuff,” he says, “but the more that I did the research, the more I took heed of it.”

IN 2015, SOPHIE SANDERS, WHO WROTE for her school newspaper at USC, thought she was vibing out to a Michael Jackson song her Uber driver was playing. The driver asked her to Google his name and what she saw floored her: it was the cover of Alfonzo, as he told her about his musical background and meeting the King of Pop. “Michael fell in love with my music,” he told her in a subsequent interview for the paper. “He liked my songs, and he understood the songs.” 

“The way Alfonzo was talking about it was not any sort of resentment or bitterness or this feeling like ‘Michael Jackson stole my look and profited off of it,’” she tells Rolling Stone. “He had a positive attitude about it.” 

The story sparked the internet’s imagination about this singer who was 20,000 feet from stardom. “As much as I love MJ, music history, and pop culture, I feel like I should know who Alfonzo is,” one Instagram user, Matt Vandrick, remarked. 

In 1969, when Jones was nine, he tuned in to The Ed Sullivan Show to see the Jackson 5 performing “I Want You Back.” He experienced the same rush Beatles fans felt five years earlier. “That was the most exciting moment in the world for me,” he tells Rolling Stone. “It was amazing to me to see little kids singing like that. That’s what really made me want to become a singer.”

Jones grew up in a working-class household. His parents — dad was an aircraft engineer, mom was a nurse — paired him with a piano teacher at age five, and he eventually took music lessons alongside his cousin at USC. “I remember people telling me then, ‘You would never get a record deal because you sound like Michael,” he says. “I never believed them.”

Jones recalls first meeting Jackson in 1978, the year he graduated high school, at the L.A. premiere of The Wiz, a retelling of The Wizard of Oz with a soul soundtrack starring Diana Ross as Dorothy and Jackson as the Scarecrow. Jackson’s solo career was in a slump. Three years earlier, his most recent solo album, Forever, Michael, had petered out on the Billboard Top LPs & Tape chart at Number 101. Although he was the most famous of the newly rebranded Jacksons, whose 1978 album, Destiny, reached Number 11, he hadn’t found his own footing as a superstar. 

Because Jackson wasn’t yet the King of Pop, the teenage Jones found him easily approachable in the back of the theater. Jones had seen the lights and limousines at the Cinerama Dome, and had to say hello to the singer who’d enchanted him on Ed Sullivan. “I went there and just started talking to him, and he was nice. No bodyguard stopped me or nothing,” he says. “He talked to me like we were friends.” The whole interaction lasted five minutes, but for Jones, it validated his urge to get into show business.

By the late Seventies, Jones, who claims he also could have pursued a professional baseball career when the San Francisco Giants scouted him for the minors, had formed a group called the Automation with his friend Michael Terry. They were desperate to get signed and had made inroads with PPL Records, whose reps suggested they sing on a track reportedly called “Keep Smiling” in honor of Lakers rookie Magic Johnson. They didn’t get a deal with PPL, but they did get behind professional microphones.

The session took place at the studio of Clay McMurray, a producer and engineer who’d spent the previous decade recording David Ruffin, the Supremes, the Four Tops, and other Motown legends. The duo was so jazzed about the experience, they mustered up the courage to knock on the door of his studio again to ask for work.

McMurray welcomed the teens by pointing to a piano and saying, “Show me what you can do.” The duo sang and danced, impressing McMurray, and within a few weeks, they had a production deal. McMurray decided to develop Jones’ songs first. Around 1980 or 1981, Jones says, he started recording an album. McMurray brought in seasoned musicians like the Atlantic Starr horn section and artists finding their sea legs, like keyboardist Ramsey Embick, who later joined the Pointer Sisters’ band. 

The LP’s first song, “Your Booty Makes Me Moody,” opens with Jones playfully hitting on a girl until the musicians settle into a funky groove. Alfonzo’s cover of Boz Scaggs’ “Low Down” has an “I wonder, wonder, wonder” refrain that could easily fit on Off the Wall. “Girl, You Are the One” features a syncopated chorus that makes you want to shake your body down to the ground. And “Change the World” seemed to augur Jackson’s post-Thriller message of unity and humanitarianism.

While recording Alfonzo, Jones claims, James Ingram, one of the vocalists featured on Quincy Jones’ 1981 album, The Dude, invited him into the studio with Quincy. Quincy was on a winning streak that started with producing Jackson’s 1979 classic, Off the Wall. Alfonzo recalls Quincy demoing songs for an upcoming project, and claims Ingram coached him on one that he says became Thriller hit “P.Y.T. (Pretty Young Thing),” an uptempo dance-funk song with a rubbery, propulsive bass line. Unfortunately, everyone he remembers being involved in the session — Quincy, Ingram, and engineer Bruce Swedien — have since died, and the demo itself has never surfaced, making it almost impossible to verify the session ever took place. (“We have no information to support any of these claims,” a rep for the estate of Michael Jackson tells Rolling Stone.)

Nobody who spoke to Rolling Stone remembers hearing the demo, but “they would want me to sing it where they can get an idea of the song and how they wanted to approach it,” Alfonzo says. “When I started [singing], they just started laughing. They were like, ‘Wow, this is incredible. Michael’s going to like the song.’” 

“I guess only God, Alfonzo, and Michael will truly know what the answer is, but I will say that I won’t totally dismiss Alfonzo’s theories [about influencing Jackson],” Questlove says. “I’m not saying, ‘Oh, yes, I absolutely 12,000 percent agree that MJ heard Alfonzo, and was like, ‘Oh, let me take that.’”

Isgro claims it was Jackson who introduced Alfonzo to him. “[Michael] said to me, ‘I like to have [Alfonzo] go in and record new songs so I can hear what I would sound like on them,’” Isgro tells Rolling Stone. “Without sounding egotistical, he says, ‘I’m asking you to sign an artist that I don’t think could ever be successful today as an artist, because he sounds identical to me.… People would view him as a copycat artist.’”

Despite Isgro’s incredulity, he signed Jones to a recording deal. “Joe wasn’t signing new artists,” Jones says. “He was signing the Chi-lites. He was signing people that had records already. So I was the first.” (Isgro, incidentally, also signed Michael’s sister La Toya to his LARC record label.)

To punctuate the album, Jones posed for a cover photo that exuded the same charm, sexiness, and fun as the music; it was a pose that invited record shoppers on a 30-odd-minute date with a man who had talent and knew it. 

He brought his own outfit to the photo shoot, but recalls someone putting him in a tux. He remembers the photographer telling him how to pose. “They guided me through the whole thing, because I was super nervous,” he says. “But they said I did a great job.” By the end of the year, Michael Jackson fans would agree.

When Thriller came out, Jones’ friends immediately noticed the lean, the white jacket, and Jackson’s laser-beam stare — all of which seemed to echo Alfonzo. “They were screaming and telling me about it on the phone,” he remembers. “I was like, ‘Wow, that’s amazing: The biggest singer on the planet took a picture like me.’ I wasn’t bitter because I was amazed.” (Jones vacillates on this point, though, in different interviews, expressing both dismay and happiness.)

“I’m pretty sure that our photo came out first,” Terry says, “but here’s the dilemma of it all: Joe Isgro was hooked up first to Motown. He was commissioned to promote Thriller.… The concept for the [Thriller] artwork could have been earlier than ours, and somehow Isgro’s people got wind of it.”

“I was really focused on the Thriller album,” Isgro says. “I really wasn’t paying a lot of attention at the time because I brought in somebody to run the [LARC] record company. Then I looked at [the Alfonzo sleeve], and I say, ‘Well, that’s really interesting.’”

Dick Zimmerman, the photographer who shot the Thriller cover, tells Rolling Stone he’s never seen the Alfonzo album before now. “Alfonzo could have been influenced by my cover image, but after 44 years I have a feeling that Thriller has outlived many additional similarities visually and musically, and perhaps will outlive any other plagiaristic imitations in the future!” he says via email.

Journalist Nelson George, who wrote about Jones for Billboard in 1983, finds the idea of Jones originating that pose preposterous. He points to Teddy Pendergrass’ It’s Time for Love (1981) and images of Lionel Richie and Luther Vandross in similar poses that came later. “He wasn’t imitating Thriller, he was imitating Off the Wall,” George says. “People seem to forget that Off the Wall, at the time, was the biggest-selling album by a male singer. It sold like [7] million records, which in 1979 for a Black male singer was crazy.’”

“Luther, Lionel, and Teddy Pendergrass and whatnot, maybe laying on the floor was just the ‘serious pose,” Questlove adds. “I did a lot of research on the Thriller cover, and I was told that Michael’s Thriller pose was almost an afterthought.… Laying down was more about accommodating the tiger that Michael wanted to include on the cover.” 

To make the mystery even cloudier, some basic facts are hard to come by even today. Jones claims Alfonzo was released June 7, 1982, but Billboard published a notice for the album the same week as Thriller’s late-November release. (The outlet noted the songs “bristle with energy that could make this new talent an artist to grow with.”) Either way, the album had a good run-up. “Girl, You Are the One,” a four-on-the-floor synth-funk pickup line, came out in 1981, according to Jones (though the labels are copyrighted 1982), and by late August 1982, it peaked at Number 22 on Billboard’s Black Singles chart. 

The lush ballad “Change the World” peaked at Number 34 on Black Singles in the winter of 1982. “Never let this cold, cold, cold world ever get you down,” he sings in falsetto, “because we still have time to change the world.” “Michael Jackson said that song is straight from God,” Jones claims, recalling a time he says he crossed paths with Jackson in a recording studio circa 1984. “He said that face-to-face to me.”

Questlove believes that connection could be possible. “If anything, that title [‘Change the World’] has wound up in sort of three different derivations …  on three separate [Michael Jackson] projects,” he says. “There’s the song [‘We Can Change the World’] on Victory, which is more Tito’s song, but still the title’s there, and then there’s ‘Heal the World,’ and there’s ‘We Are the World.’ I know that that title has wound up in some way, shape, or form in the Jackson canon.”

George thinks Alfonzo’s moderate success was a result of coming at the right time in the right place. “That particular kind of mid-tempo rhythm was all over Black radio,” the journalist says. “Off the Wall was such an important record. It influenced everybody from [“I Just Gotta Have You” hitmaker] Kashif here in New York to a lot of guys on the West Coast with a lot of the SOLAR stuff.” (The label SOLAR put out albums by Shalamar, Klymaxx, the Sylvers, and Babyface.)

At the time, Jones was on top of the world. He claims a crowd went crazy for him during one concert at California’s Pomona Fairgrounds.”It was scary,” he says. “The crowd attacked me. They was coming after me and, thank God, my bodyguard snatched me up because I was little back then.”

Another time, he estimates about 300 people came to his home, prompting his dad to call the police. “He wasn’t ready for people to start coming to his house,” Terry says. “He didn’t have a manager, and it was kind of unorganized. I think Joe should have put us up in a townhome somewhere away from the hood and gave us some money and just let us write and get down, but he didn’t do that.”

“That’s when my dad was like, ‘Man, get out of that,’” Jones claims. “I took his advice. And when I think back now, he saved my life.” Whether he felt overwhelmed by sudden fame or found himself moonwalked off of radio, he says he was at peace backing away from his career before even getting to perform on Soul Train or American Bandstand.

Meanwhile, Thriller arrived on Nov. 29, 1982, and invigorated anyone who heard it. “When that Thriller album came out, it was over,” Terry says. “We got caught in the tsunami.”

With a string of hits including “Billie Jean,” “Beat It,” “Wanna Be Startin’ Somethin’,” and, of course, “P.Y.T. (Pretty Young Thing),” Jackson’s album quickly became the bestselling album of all time for its era. The RIAA has certified it 34 times platinum, now second only to the Eagles’ Greatest Hits.

“Alfonzo’s voice sounded like the most successful adult male vocal in the world at the time,” Isgro says. “His chances were very limited.”

“There’s only one Michael Jackson,” Bill Craig, who promoted Alfonzo to radio for LARC, says. “The public gets tired of hearing [the same thing]. … So it was, ‘Here’s Alfonzo, and there went Alfonzo,’ because there was so many records and so much competition out there during that era.”

The last glimmer of Alfonzo’s success arrived in May 1983, when Stevie Wonder hosted Saturday Night Live. During a “Saturday Night News” segment, Wonder played a British music critic. “I was looking at the Top 20 in American music this week, and I was pleased to see the inclusion of such works as George Clinton’s ‘Atomic Dog’ and Alfonzo’s ‘Your Booty Makes Me Moody,” the character says, earning laughs. “They’ve got a good beat. They’re easy to dance to. And best of all, they’ve got lyrics that don’t make any sense at all.” It would be the last time Alfonzo’s name would reach Americans on a large scale for decades.

After stepping back into private life, he worked at a pizza parlor until he eventually got a gig singing songs by Jackson, Wonder, and Earth, Wind, and Fire with a group that performed “a lot of shows” at Caesars Palace in Las Vegas. He doesn’t remember the group’s name, emphasizing that it was simply an opportunity to sing. “The songs were their choice,” he says, referring to his bandmates. “They just hired me as the lead singer.” He also claims to have recorded demos for Tiffany, New Edition (notably “All for Love”), and Jackson himself. He doesn’t remember which songs he sang for Jackson, but one demo he says he sang on, “Behind the Mask,” came out with Jackson’s vocals on the Thriller 40 reissue.

On a few occasions throughout the Eighties (and once in the Nineties), Jones says, he would “bump into” Jackson, usually in recording studios. “Every time I would run into Michael Jackson, he would say to me, ‘Man, you got too much beautiful music. Why don’t you come back to the music business?’” Jones says. 

By the late Eighties, Jones had a new record deal and a new professional relationship. Wayne Henderson, trombonist for the Jazz Crusaders, had co-produced the debut album, 1984’s Centipede, for Michael’s sister Rebbie with Michael, Tito, and Randy Jackson. Michael, Jones claims, introduced him to Henderson.

Jones’ second album, Champion of Love, came out in 1988, the year after Jackson released Bad. Like Jackson, he posed in a black jacket with a hand on his hip, although Jones opted for the belt of a prizefighter over black leather. This time, the cover introduced him as Alfonz Jones (“to try something different from the A to the Z,” he says). Collaborating with Phillip Ingram (James’ brother), he wrote most of the music himself, but included covers, like his own high-tenor version of Bill Withers’ “Ain’t No Sunshine.” None of the songs charted in the U.S.

When he got home, he started teaching music at a private school for a couple of years. Then he drove a tractor-trailer, a truck for Penske, and a big rig for a private company, delivering produce across the country for a few more years. In the late 1980s, he got married. The couple had two boys and a girl, and even though he’s now divorced, he still beams about his grandchildren.

Jones’ third album, credited to Alfonzo Jones, came out in 2001 on another label, Ultimate. “Never Gonna Stop” features 11 songs, including the title cut, a sexy slow jam, before ending on a positive note with “Happy Mother’s Day,” a synth-y slow jam honoring moms. He recorded most of the music himself. Jackson, who’d spent much of the previous decade trying to shake off myriad controversies, released his final album, Invincible, that year with a markedly different cover from Jones’, and no songs about mothers. 

Jackson died in 2009, but even in the years after, people kept Jones’ connection with the singer alive. “There were periods when I would do these Michael Jackson–only sets, especially during the period in which he passed away,” Questlove says. “I would purposely play ‘Your Booty Makes Me Moody’ only to get a laugh.”

In the new millennium, Jones continued driving, at one point for Uber, and now for HopSkipDrive, transporting kids to school. He hasn’t given up on music and wants to produce for other artists. He’s also been working on new songs for himself, which he’ll start releasing in the next few months. He recorded all of the music and is promising “a lot of dance stuff, some love songs, and some world songs.” The latter he describes with a proposed song title, “Show the World How to Love Again.” 

Fortuitously, he has also realigned with Isgro. “He still has that voice,” Isgro says. “I know Michael would be really happy for him because he knows [Alfonzo] really never had a chance while Michael was alive.”

“I think everything worked out exactly the way it’s supposed to work out,” Jones says. “When I look back now, I go, ‘That was designed perfectly.’”