PRESS

Los Angeles Times - January 13, 2002

Excerpt from POP EYE

January 13, 2002

By STEVE HOCHMAN

LABOR OF LOVE: In recent years there's been a lot of talk about a lost spirit in the music business, with all the corporate mergers changing the tone and goals. But a team built around a core of veterans of A&M Records (before it was absorbed into Interscope two years ago) has come together to market and promote an album in that old spirit--and the team members are all working for free.

The album is "Spirit Touches Ground" by Josh Clayton-Felt, and it will be released by DreamWorks Records on Feb. 5 with marketing and promotion provided by various independent consultants. The reason is that these people had all worked with Clayton-Felt, a Los Angeles musician who passed away two years ago at 32 from complications of cancer. He had completed the recordings of what was to be his second solo album shortly before he was hospitalized for his illness.

It's a fair amount of work, but this is what we do," says Diana Leher, who had been Clayton-Felt's product manager at A&M and now, with partner Kelly Mills, another former A&M executive, has an independent music marketing firm called Alchemy. "Josh was one of the truly nicest people I ever met, and there was no artifice about that--and there's the fact that we really dug his music. So when we started working on this project, we rounded up the old troops."

Among other A&M vets involved are former head of artist development Larry Weintraub, who now has an Internet marketing firm, and former head of alternative promotion Jack Isquith, now an independent consultant.

Additionally, the noted video team of Jonathan Dayton and Valerie Ferris is using old performance footage to create a clip for the song "Building Atlantis," also for no fee.

Steven Baker, a DreamWorks executive and husband of Clayton-Felt's sister Laura, notes that funding for the release and marketing is coming from the family, and much of the sales proceeds are earmarked for charities including VH1's Save the Music. Baker says that while there are no delusions of platinum sales, this is no mere token, sentimental release.

We gave Joyce Castagnola, the head of sales at DreamWorks, a budget so she could do retail-store placement buys and listening posts and such things," Baker says. "And we're hoping for some radio airplay. The [adult alternative] format is what we're going for, and so far there's been good feedback."