Is there a deeply developed backstory for this fake band?

Why yes, yes there is.

Radio station WTRB was founded in 1973, by a group of young and scrappy music lovers in a euphoric high after the Paris Peace Accords ended the war in Vietnam. They believed anything was posible.

WTRB’s ethos was simple: Play good music.  Genres were irrelevant.  Did the song kill?  Then let’s play it.  Record label relationships were unimportant, and so too perhaps unintentionally were ad sales. Great music was their only focus.

Somehow, the station survived, perhaps on the strength of its unique morning show, CC And The Madman.  Crazy Curt and Madman Matt in the morning broke every rule conventional radio provided, and if they ran out of rules they made more so they could break them. Playlists in the 70’s ranged from Stravinsky to The Kinks to The Brothers Johnson to the Steve Miller Band to The Sex Pistols to god knows what, and a devoted listenership emerged.

The Madman was, and is, addicted to radio resets. “It’s 7:53 here on WTRB, you’re listening to CC and The Madman…”…he did this every 2 minutes to problematic extents. CC kept setting up songs that the station did not own or have the rights to play, and would be horrendous fit for morning drive anyway. “Here’s Paul Hindemith,” he would scream into the void. The Madman did a reset, and kept the show moving.

They became a cult favorite, then a massive unlikely crossover legit favorite, and then a cult favorite again.

Eventually, CC and The Madman were fired and cancelled.  For so many reasons….the exact transgression has been lost to history.

CC and The Madman missed their show, but more than anything they missed hearing the music.

They decided to start playing gigs at rock clubs themselves, under the alias CC & The Madman.  Changing just the “and” to an ampersand, for copyright infringement protection.  They no longer had a radio show, but now they have a band….who aim to recreate the songs perfectly.

On every gig, CC & The Madman play an impeccably chosen set from a specific year and season, with a disparate playlist impossibly crossing genres and styles like no band before or since. They replicate the records they heard on the radio with loving exactitude, choosing authenticity over eye candy, but usually delivering both.

See you at the next one.