Edge City’s music combines the singer/songwriter tradition of their home in Austin, Texas, with the East Coast rock and roll of their former hometown just outside Baltimore, Maryland.
In 1984, Edge City’s Jim Patton and Sherry Brokus ran an ad in the Baltimore and Washington newspapers looking for players who liked “Byrds, Stones, Van Morrison, Creedence”, and they’ve stayed pretty true to that for over twenty years.
In the late ‘80s and early ‘90s they released two singles, an EP, and a full length CD (on Red Wheelbarrow Records) and played all the great defunct clubs in Baltimore and Washington: from the Marble Bar, Max’s, and 8X10, to the Bayou, D.C Space, the Brickhouse, and the Omega Inn. The band played CBGBs, New York’s punk mecca, twice, and went as far South as Baity’s in Winston-Salem, where the sign outside read: “Tuesday: Joan Jett; Thursday: The Smithereens; Sunday: Edge City”. (About 12 people were in attendance, most others apparently saving their money for the Smithereens/Jett shows.)
In the 90s, Patton and Brokus moved Edge City to Austin, Texas, where in 2000 they released “Mystery Ride”, a mix of songs written in Maryland and new ones from Austin, and produced by the great Lloyd Maines and with David Grissom (John Mellencamp, the Dixie Chicks) on lead guitar. Edge City played shows from Bar Harbor to San Diego, and in 2006 released their second full length Austin CD, “Keepers of the Flame”, produced by Bradley Kopp and featuring some of Austin’s finest players: Lloyd Maines, Glenn Fukunaga, Darcie Deaville, David Webb, Jon Sanchez, and Freddie Krc.
In 2008, Patton and Brokus put Edge City on hiatus as the folk/Americana world began to open up to them and as more and more they wanted to separate their acoustic music from the electric.
Jim Patton & Sherry Brokus 