Off the Charts

The name Marcy Rauer Wagman might not mean much to some local guitar-slinging hipster, but that's just because he hasn't done his homework. She's an attorney, a teacher and, for going on four decades, an overall music-scene mover and shaker. You know her jingles, you just don't know you know them.

"Marcy's a fucking icon in this town," says Andy Hurwitz, a fellow entertainment-business lawyer who currently shares a firm with Rauer Wagman. "She deserves a walk of fame jawn down the Avenue of the Arts. She's had her hands in more parts of this city's culture than anybody will ever know."

On the first sunny day in May, the only thing this fucking icon has in her hand is a tissue. "I'm as sick as a dog," says Rauer Wagman, simultaneously stifling a laugh and a cough. She pushes on through because she has stuff to do: finish the semester at Drexel where she's an associate professor, check the stats on the school's MAD Dragon music label and publishing house she founded, consult on her new Record Label in a Box project (started with Hurwitz) that guides independent artists through the confusing minutiae of the digital music biz. "I've always been a juggler," she says. "No biggie."

From the looks of the West Oak Lane native's background — psychedelic-era teen sensation, Billboard chart-topping songwriter, producer, legal eagle — Rauer Wagman likes to get invested in everything she's touched. That includes studying piano, flute, guitar and sax as a child and singing "professionally" at area temples and B'nai B'rith luncheons, to say nothing of one-off gigs like the Philadelphia Transvestites Beauty Pageant and Ball. As we talk, it becomes clear how she was raised. She doesn't curse (she spells out words like "s--t"), and for a woman in the rock biz, she doesn't kiss-and-tell rude tales.

Though she was a childhood jazz-bo, the young Marcy was first and foremost a Beatles freak. "When I was 11, I convinced my best friend to form a band because I wanted to write with Paul McCartney," says Rauer Wagman. "I started writing like mad until we had a dozen or so originals." The draw was that they were grade-school-age girls playing original songs in go-go boots. She laughs at the memory of playing her songs in front of Cameo-Parkway execs. "As we got in the taxi to go home, my mother said, 'First, finish the sixth grade. Then we'll talk.'"

After the boots, her parents bought her a reel-to-reel, and her production chops grew when a friend of a friend with a recording studio in the basement of a shoe store let her behind the boards: "I fell in lust with all the gear. I was hooked."

During high school, Rauer Wagman stalked studios in the tri-state area, doing everything from sweeping floors to cleaning out wooden cocaine bowls. "I just wanted to learn the process and vocabulary," she says. "Women weren't taken seriously as rock musicians, let alone engineers or producers." There were no women in executive positions in the music industry in the '60s — no female A&R people, no female entertainment attorneys or concert promoters. Women in the music industry then were secretaries, publicists, chick singers and groupies. "There were a few songwriters who got respect, but not many female musicians did," she notes.

She found respect and camaraderie when she got to Temple University, met compositional wunderkind Edgar Koshatka and formed the jazzy psychedelic ensemble High Treason in 1969. The local rock scene then was vibrant, due to the support of Larry Magid's Electric Factory, WMMR DJs and big-name locals like American Dream, Mandrake Memorial and Woody's Truck Stop.

Still, not every act got signed to a label, recorded its eponymous album at a major studio (NYC's The Record Plant) and toured nationally, like High Treason did. "I was very lucky," says Rauer Wagman, whose band was housed in a Jenkintown colonial noted for its "Humphrey's Exterminators" sign with a picture of a termite on its roof.

"High Treason came with detachable flag rolling paper on its cover," says drummer-turned-documentary-filmmaker George Manney. "That was ahead of its time." Like Manney's then-band Stone Dawn, High Treason stuck out from the crowd. "Both acts got the Jefferson Airplane tag because of the male and female lead vocalists."

Rauer Wagman's band opened for Van Morrison, Chicago and Santana, hung out with Bowie, Rod and Elton. Still, Rauer Wagman wasn't fulfilled. She didn't love performing. She preferred to be on par with the promoters and producers behind the music.

After High Treason split in 1973, Rauer Wagman studio-hopped, first for vocal work and then for arranging on jingles and records. Always on time, never high and 100 percent professional, she would stick around after sessions and wound up producing vocal sessions and mix downs. One night in a Manhattan studio, she was approached with a question: Can you ghostwrite a 60-second jingle in 24 hours? "I said yes even though I had never written one," she giggles. "I had no idea whether it was good or not, or what he or his client wanted. Much to my surprise, about a week later, he called, told me the client loved it, and that I would be getting a check in the mail. Two weeks later, a $500 check appeared. It was a light bulb moment."

She took a detour when she got married and moved to Miami. There she wrote features and record reviews for The Coconut Grove Gazette, took work at the legendary Criteria Recording Studios, and created on-air ads for South Beach's top-rated WLVE Love 94 FM. But before the '70s ended she was divorced and back in Philly.

"My life radically changed at that point, for the better," says Rauer Wagman. "The main thrust was to gain the trust of local ad agencies. They were used to going to NYC for their jingles, and I had to prove to them that I could do a better job, for less."

First, in 1978 she started her own production and jingle-writing company, Apropos Music, working out of Queen Village Studios for various ad agencies and television commercial companies such as Shulman Berry Kramer. Then the next year she became the musical toast of Philly society when the old Bellevue Stratford Hotel (now the Park Hyatt Bellevue) became the Fairmont Hotel and firmly ensconced Rauer Wagman in its tony cocktail lounge, where she played and sang standards for blue bloods.

By 1980, ready to boost her jingle business, she joined with Larry Freedman and Bob Dewald to become one of the hottest commercial production companies on the East Coast: Freedman, Cohn and Dewald Inc. (her ex-married name was Cohn; she has been married to Bruce Wagman for 20 years). "The FC&D recording studio was on Second and Girard in a warehouse above a popcorn and cotton-candy machine factory, so the whole place smelled like a circus," she says. With offices in Manhattan and Philly, they wrote and produced music for Campbell's Soup, McDonald's, Herr's, Good Morning America, Action News and other clients for more than 15 years. "C'mon, she wrote the most famous tune in Philly history — the KYW Newsradio 1060 jingle," laughs Hurwitz.

She and Dewald also landed a deal with a country music publisher. She'd never written a country song, so she approached it the same way she learned jingle writing, pulling the songs apart to see what the writers were doing to make it work. "I examined chord progressions, lyrics, melodic inventions and story angles to try to determine what the formula was."

The algebra of hit songwriting came in handy when Philly guitarist Tommy Conwell and his manager, Steve Mountain, called. Poised to land a deal with Columbia, Conwell needed a single. As she had with C&W, Rauer Wagman did her research. "I went to 10 of his gigs and took copious notes about his range, stage presence, attitude, level of musicianship and the theme of his songs," she says. "He was a natural star." That's probably why "I'm Not Your Man" hit No. 1 on the Billboard Pop charts in 1988 — it sounded natural.

This level of studied dissection makes sense, considering she had entertained the notion of medical school in her youth (and both of her parents were teachers). In 1993, she returned to college for the sole purpose of getting into to law school. She got a Bachelor of Arts degree in philosophy, and almost completed two other degrees, one in biology and one in cognitive psychology. Rauer Wagman had never thought about becoming an attorney before '93, but when she looks back on it now, law seemed like a logical transition. She wanted a way to help her artist colleagues and friends avoid the pitfalls of the music business. "Plus I'd had my share, and fill, of getting screwed in the music business, from getting songs stolen to bad management and publishing deals," she explains.

Her desire to help rookies in the biz led her to Drexel and its Music Industry Program (MIP) in 02002. "It aspired to integrate both the technology and the business aspects of the industry, an amalgam of everything you ever wanted to know." The curriculum contained very few fully developed music business courses, so she developed them. Drexel had just one recording studio — "and it sucked, frankly."

How could the school gain national attention for its new program and get a new studio built? Start a record label. Jonathan Estrin, then the dean of the College of Media Arts & Design, asked Rauer Wagman to create MAD Dragon Records. "It was a great idea, but we didn't have startup funds," she says. So she created a one-week Summer Music Industry "boot camp" for high school students and used the profits for the label. Soon after, she got MAD Dragon national retail distribution through Rykogroup. With the label running, she formed other music industry revenue streams through MAD Dragon in publishing, booking and video production. "As far as being competitive with other labels, [Mad Dragon] is unique because it is ensconced in a nonprofit institution," she says.

The ever-shifting music-biz landscape is what led her and Andy Hurwitz to create Record Label in a Box (RLIB). "Traditional record labels are extinct, and most peeps are ill-equipped to take on the functions a label provides, so we thought we'd offer all of these services a la carte," says Hurwitz. "Pick what you need, and we'll help chart your best plan by providing marketing plans, social network management, creative revenue streams and exploiting new technologies. You can be the back end of your own business." The whole thing seems to have struck a chord — not only with working musicians but with high school kids, middle-aged dads and church choirs that simply want help forging their own musical destiny.

Rauer Wagman would've made her own best RLIB client, self-navigating her way through unknown waters on her own terms. "I've always been independent in the sense that I steered my own ship and carefully picked my crew mates. I didn't always get that right. Still, I spent my whole life taking advantage of every opportunity and every potential revenue stream, like indie artists do now."

Ultimately, she is a hard-line realist, intolerant of incompetence and with zero respect for mediocrity in herself or in others. "My father once told me that there's nothing worse than mediocrity," she says. "I can't handle weak women, or women who hate their own gender, but adore confident, self-made, meritorious divas. I'm certainly no genius, so I have to work harder than others to accomplish my goals. And if I fail, so what? At least I tried. I probably learned something along the way."

(a_amorosi@citypaper.net)