Cutting Edge.

KDGE Program Director Josh Venable Looks Back At The Best Performers In EdgeFest History.

On Sunday night at FC Dallas Stadium in Frisco, local alternative rock station KDGE 102.1-FM The Edge will hold the 22nd incarnation of its annual EdgeFest concert series. And it’s a rather big one, too.

Aside from bands like The Black Keys, who last weekend headlined one of the most talked-about Coachella festivals in recent years, and Garbage, who haven’t played in Dallas in a decade, this year’s fest boasts a boatload of popular alt-rock acts like Cake, Cage the Elephant and Arctic Monkeys just to name a few.

More importantly, though, it marks the first EdgeFest since new program director Josh Venable took over the station last summer. In other words, the lineup for EdgeFest 22 is the first assembled by the newly vetted PD. And, really, we can think of nobody better than Venable for the task. Aside from being with the station for the past 19 years since starting out as an intern in ’93, he’s been a fan of the station since its launch, and has attended nearly every EdgeFest.

So when we spoke with Venable back in February about putting together the lineup for this year’s fest, we thought it’d also be fun to get the unofficial EdgeFest historian’s take on the best performers in the history of the event. “In the early days, Material Issue played probably every single one of them and that was awesome,” says Venable immediately.

Here’s the rest of his almost year-by-year breakdown of the best performers in EdgeFest history.

EdgeFest 1: “The Charlatans and Pearl Jam.”

EdgeFest 2: “Dinosaur Jr.”

EdgeFest 3: “Material Issue, The Charlatans, Tripping Daisy, Crowded House, Possum Dixon, Eve’s Plum, Crash Test Dummies, and The Violent Femmes. I might put that as my favorite EdgeFest ever in 1994.”

EdgeFest 4: “Hagfish.”

EdgeFest 5: “Lush.”

EdgeFest 7: “The Mighty Mighty Bosstones. That one we had in Arlington in the parking lot of the baseball stadium.”

EdgeFest 8: “I can honestly say there was no one I was excited about seeing at this one. Ugh.”

EdgeFest 10: “I got to see The Cult for the first time!”

EdgeFest 14: “Jimmy Eat World was really good.”

EdgeFest 16: “There’s no getting around the fact that EdgeFest 16 was one of the best things we’ve ever done. The Killers, My Chemical Romance, Muse, The Kaiser Chiefs, Sparta, Placebo. Seeing Placebo at EdgeFest was pretty amazing because it was only the second time that they had ever been in Dallas.”

EdgeFest 20: “Phoenix.”