Three local bands and a comedian rally to aid a 3-year-old girl’s battle against cancer.

Comedian Rudy Martinez’ accompanied his new bride to the doctor for a biopsy after learning she had cervical cancer. Martinez sat by her side during an invasive procedure and noticed tears in his wife’s eyes, which made him cry.

“She looked up at me and said, ‘I’m so sorry,’” he says. “I told her she doesn’t have anything to be sorry for.”

“s‘I’m just sorry because we’re not going to be able to have sex for months and we just got married last week,’” he remembers her saying.

Martinez responded, “Honey, the doctor didn’t say anything about me not being able to have sex.”

Martinez’s wife, who’s been cancer free for nine months now, erupted into laughter.

“A huge weight was lifted,” he says. “Laughter is vital. It’s what kept my grandmother [who’s in remission from breast cancer] from going batshit crazy and giving up. It’s the same for my wife.”

Maddie’s Monster Bash at Carbone’s on Sunday hits close to home for Martinez, the event’s emcee as well as one of the day’s performers. Little 3-year-old Madeline “Monster Pants” Pfefferkuch was diagnosed with Stage 4 neuroblastoma – the most common childhood extracranial solid cancer – on May 22. Her parents, Alex, a special-needs teacher with the Monterey Peninsula Unified School District, and Sarah, director of MY Museum, are spending most of their days at Stanford’s Lucile Packard Children’s Hospital, where Maddie is currently undergoing a second round of chemotherapy.

Alex says Maddie is responding “very well” to the treatment thus far. With a future that entails three more rounds of chemo, surgery to remove the mass in her stomach, stem-cell replacement and radiation, the road ahead for Maddie will be arduous, but her parents find solace in being part of such a loving community.

“I’m so humbled that people give of themselves so much to someone they barely know or don’t know at all,” Sarah says. “It’s a little overwhelming. Everyone in the community has been so loving.”

It can certainly seem like any time someone in the community needs a helping hand, musicians are among the first to jump on board. This benefit includes roots-based folk rockers The Audio Waltz, whose vivacious, steel-lunged lead singer Jessica Voris carries the band to Appalachian Mountain heights with soulful vocals evocative of Alabama Shakes’ Brittany Howard. Longtime Peninsula favorites The Dani Paige Band are also on the bill, in part because the fight against cancer hits way close to home for them, too: Frontwoman Dani Paige had to deal with losing her mother to brain cancer a few years ago, which subsequently inspired her heart-on-the-sleeve ballad “Take You Away.”

When headlining headbangers City Sin Angels caught wind of Maddie and the event, getting involved was an easy choice.

“Any chance we can help a child who’s suffering, we’ll do anything without hesitation,” lead singer Rick Scolari says. “We’d even [prostitute] ourselves out to raise money for her.”

Such tongue-in-cheek humor floods the 14 guts-to-the-wall tracks – along with Dave Mustaine-scented riffage – on their debut Poetry for the Damned.

On the surface, “Supermodels and Tecate,” CSA’s most-requested song when they play The Whisky in Los Angeles, seems like a bold story about a really good night in Baja, Calif. But it’s really just about practicing in drummer Mike Carrillo’s garage studio in the suburbs of Soledad.

“Supermodels from magazines like Maxim cover the walls,” Scolari says. “Aside from our girlfriends that we bring to the studio, there are never any girls in [the garage]; it’s just four chubby Mexicans playing metal and drinking beer. The only things we have are Tecates and a wall full of supermodels that we’ll never meet.”

The band – also featuring guitarist Diego Ramirez and bassist Chriz Alcaraz – is far from a one-trick, heavy metal pony, as they prove on the album’s title-track opener, a psychedelic discordance of chirping birds, clacking chairs, wind, shaking rattlesnakes and Scolari’s gloomy poetry.

“We didn’t know where we were going with the album and I liked it that way,” Scolari says. “I don’t want to just be a heavy metal band and I don’t want to be described as soft or hard, I want to do whatever we want and this album set the rules for that. We also play weird stuff.”

On their website, CSA defines the band’s name as “a conventional representation of such a being, in human form, to deliver the sounds of solace and redemption.” With the passion they have for helping kids like Maddie, it sounds appropriate.

In addition to comedy and music, the nine-hour benefit will include games and auctions. One of the auction items: The opportunity to shave Martinez’s head in a Mohawk to match Maddie’s. (Second-place bidder gets to dye it pink.)

For Martinez, that means fuel for more funniness and, with it, healing.

“I had to ask my wife for permission because the following week is our one-year anniversary,” Martinez says. “She didn’t want to be the ass who says no to a kid with cancer, so I guess she won’t mind showing up for our anniversary with someone who looks like a tool.”

MADDIE’S MONSTER BASH: BENEFIT FOR MADELINE PFEFFERKUCH happens 2-11pm (music and comedy begins at 7pm) Sunday, July 14, at Carbone’s, 214 Lighthouse Ave., Monterey. Donations accepted. 643-9169.