Gene “Sarasota Slim” Hardage Concert.

Sarasota Slim: guitar man, singer, and songwriter, performs with his band throughout Florida and the Southeast. Gene Hardage got a guitar at 13 and was self-taught with the help of friends and the typical teenage obsession with music.  In his early 20's he started playing in bands and occasionally doing gigs with a great blues harp player known as Rock Bottom and then eventually becoming the guitar player in his band the JunRock Bottom gave everyone silly stage-nicknames and when Gene Hardage became Sarasota Slim it stuck. In 1987 when the Russian Chernobyl disaster was spewing radioactive fallout all over Scandinavia, it was a major turning point and Sarasota Slim made a last minute decision not to go on the 2nd Rock Bottom tour of Scandinavia. From that point forward Sarasota Slim started fronting his own bands singing and writing his own songs. In 1988, Sarasota Slim teamed up with Lucky Peterson for a wild couple of years of playing and touring the Southgle Bushmasters. When the original Green Iguana on Westshore opened, Jessie and Kimbo (representatives from the Gulf Coast Blues Society) convinced them to have a Monday night blues jam hosted by the Sarasota Slim Band.  Tip jar money from the blues jam was used to fund a few events for the Gulf Coast Blues Society. When that blues society folded - the "new" Sun Coast Blues Society was born! In the early 90's Sarasota Slim released 4 CDs on the Italian label Appaloosa complete with tours of Europe to promote them. In 1999 and 2001, Sarasota Slim released 2 CDs on his own Possum Phono-Graphics label.