Samenvatting

In the whimsically paradoxical "Sober Bands of the Seventies," Harmony Vane embarks on an ambitious quest to chronicle the virtuous rock icons of an era synonymous with anything but virtue. This voluminous work, with its table of contents promising an exhaustive account of abstinent anthems from "Brown Sugarless" to "Let’s Go Get Clean," delivers an unexpected punchline: page after page is unapologetically blank.

The jest unfolds as readers seeking the storied tracks are met with the silent, white expanse of the pages—a bold statement on the futility of finding sobriety in the bacchanalian revels of seventies rock 'n' roll. The book, claiming to contain music from all the bands featured within, becomes an art piece in itself—each empty page a placeholder for a song from a band that simply doesn't exist.

Vane's introduction playfully alludes to a universe where "Lucy in the Sky with Diamonds" might just be an ode to the starry heavens enjoyed without the influence of LSD, yet the subsequent lack of text winks at the reader with the reality that such interpretations are as fanciful as the existence of the bands themselves.

"Sober Bands of the Seventies" is Harmony Vane's silent opus, a mock compendium where the reader's laughter is the only soundtrack that fills the void. It's an imaginative journey into a make-believe world where the music of these non-existent bands is as audible as the pages are filled—a clever, blank canvas that echoes the absence of the very purity it seeks to document. The album, it jests, features a full setlist from these artists, in a collection as intangible as the bands' supposed temperance. The search, indeed, is a pursuit in Vane—both literally and figuratively.

• "Step inside the greatest musical 'what if' with Harmony Vane's ’Sober Bands of the Seventies.' Turn each page of this comprehensive guide to discover a silent tribute to the era's most elusive legends—the temperate troubadours and sober songsters that history forgot. A clever riddle wrapped in a mystery, this book is a must-have for any fan of seventies music, irony, and the sound of silent judgment."
• "Harmony Vane presents an empty stage in ’Sober Bands of the Seventies,' an audacious work of non-fiction that catalogues the absent voices of virtue from a decade drenched in decadence. Each blank page sings a ballad of the bands that never were, inviting readers to ponder the quiet possibility of a different kind of seventies—one that surely existed in some parallel universe. It's the ultimate collector's item for those who cherish the echoes of an alternative past."
• "In a bold move of historical satire, ’Sober Bands of the Seventies' offers nothing less than a void—the definitive silence of clean-living bands that weren't. Harmony Vane’s book is an empty vessel, inviting you to fill it with your imagination and maybe a little bit of wishful thinking about the era of sex, drugs, and rock 'n' roll. It's an album of absence, a symphony of the unfound, and a poignant joke about the unlikelihood of purity in the age of excess."