A GEM FROM L.A.’S ROCK MONSTER

Thelonious Monster’s new album, “Next Saturday Afternoon,” isn’t going to cause a stir in executive suites around town.

Recorded for a minuscule $2,600 in an age when journeyman bands routinely spend a hundred times that much, the LP is a stubbornly independent account of post-teen alienation; a record that mixes folk, jazz, blues and high-speed punk styles without regard to radio programming dictates.

No big-time promotion man is going to be able to walk into a powerhouse station like the vacuous KWVE or the air-headed KPWR and say, “Boy, have I got the record for you.”

Yet “Next Saturday Afternoon” (Relativity Records) will be prized by those who crave penetrating and perceptive rock ‘n’ roll. In its best moments, the LP explores questions of identity and self-worth in stark, unflinching ways that recall the passion and purpose of some of rock’s classic collections.

We’re not talking here about the polite, poetic alienation of Simon & Garfunkel or the full-scale extravagance and drama of the Who. The parallels are closer to the shattering despair of Neil Young’s “Tonight’s the Night,” the naked revelations of John Lennon’s first solo album or--for a more contemporary model--the natural innocence of the Replacements’ “Tim.”

Bob Forrest, the lead singer and lyricist for the Los Angeles band whose name is a tip of the hat to jazz great Thelonious Monk, would probably laugh somewhat anxiously at that praise--as he should.

“Next Saturday Afternoon” is too modest and deliberately unstructured a work to be lumped in the same category as Young and Lennon, though it’s not hard imagining fans of those artists identifying with the raw, unfiltered emotions of the Monster’s music.

In a Technicolor pop world, this is a very black-and-white album, one whose truths unfold with the understated insights and unhurried pace of Peter Bogdanovich’s film “The Last Picture Show.” These songs have a sense of having been lived, not just imagined.

Some of the tales are about the monotony and absurdities of being in a rock band, while others are about the monotony and absurdities of life itself. To Forrest, the dividing line is almost irrelevant.

“People say our music is discouraging and negative, but I think it is hopeful,” Forrest said. “I think it’s hopeful in the sense at least you understand your problems. Most people don’t make it that far . . . they don’t even know what is wrong with their lives.

“The songs are always about me. I can’t look at life from someone else’s point of view because I don’t really know what they are going through. It’s easier to trust what you are going through . . . and the reason our songs are the way they are is that I have a lot of unsettling feelings.”

Forrest, 26, looks like a mischievous leprechaun as he sits in a Fairfax area restaurant, smiling broadly as he takes shots at the record industry while tugging at the long, stringy hair sprouting out from beneath a black bowler.

“So many (commercial) bands sound the same . . . Starship, Heart, Journey. You can’t tell one from the other--even though one of them has a girl singer, doesn’t it?” Forrest says.

“I hate all those bands. If there was a revolution, I’d like to be musical ambassador or something and line all those people up and put them in jail.”

A Los Angeles native who spent many of his teen years in Huntington Beach, Forrest takes glee taking potshots at anonymous hit makers because it relieves some of the frustrations of his own career.

Many of those frustrations are channeled into a song, “Lookin’ to the West,” that outlines his early love for music (beginning as a kid listening to Kiss and Led Zeppelin) and the bitterness he feels about the way his band has been ignored by so much of the music industry.

Sample lines:

This business tears right at your soul

Turns you inside out, flips you upside down

Takes you all around

Till you don’t know you anymore.

Though the Monster has received considerable critical support over the last two years, Monster couldn’t get a local record deal, partly, Forrest believes, because of the outlandish nature of its live shows. “Drunken anarchist” is Forrest’s description of his reputation on the local club scene. He has been known to show up on stage drunk and get in fights with everyone from band members to club owners.

“I guess we have been our worst enemy,” he said. “That squabbling you see on stage is the real thing. We’re always on the verge of breaking up. I never thought we’d make it through this record. We argue about everything, but I love the music the band makes and I want to be part of it.

“But you learn to deal with the problems inside the band. It’s the outside problems that get you, the way the industry makes you feel like dirt sometimes.”

Thelonious Monster, which will appear at Club Lingerie next Sunday, doesn’t have to be so relentlessly underground. An experienced, commercially minded record producer could have helped steer the band in a more ambitious direction by weaving these loosely connected songs into a more overt “concept” album and by giving the songs fuller, more dramatic arrangements.

By making a more self-conscious work, however, Forrest and the band would have sacrificed the very elements that make “Next Saturday Afternoon” such a unique and endearing exercise. Part of the persuasiveness of songs like “Lookin’ to the West” and “Michael Jordan” is their very modesty.

At its core, the philosophy never gets more profound than Forrest’s intro to one of the songs, “Wish I knew what the key to life was/ Since I don’t, I think I’ll have another Budweiser.”

Forrest’s personal life has been as traumatic as his days in Thelonious Monster and his songs outline those frustrations.

Sample lyrics from Forrest’s “Hang Tough”:

Nothing ever changes and probably never will.

The harder I keep trying, the more they change the rules.

Every time I get it right, it ends up being wrong.

And all the things I’ve figured out

Don’t mean that much at all.

The way he tells it, Forrest has been through a lot. His story is as colorful as some of the imaginary bios supplied the press in the early days by Bob Dylan, Forrest’s musical hero. Only Forrest swears his story is true.

He was adopted, he says, by a couple who--as a teen-ager--he learned were really his grandparents. The woman he thought was his sister had given birth to him when she was 14. Identity crisis No. 1.

Thanks to his “adopted” father’s success in the neon sign business, Forrest spent much of early years in relative comfort, though circumstances changed dramatically when his father died. “We went from upper-middle class to lower-middle class real fast. My father didn’t believe in insurance.” Identity crisis No. 2.

“I was spoiled for so long, getting everything . . . but that changed after my father died and it changed again when my (adoptive) mother died. I was left at 19 all by myself.”

He spent a couple of years each at Golden West and Los Angeles City colleges, taking journalism classes, but mostly treading water. While at City College, he started producing some late-night rock shows at a bar near the campus, later switching to a club on Hollywood Boulevard.

He didn’t think much about being a singer, however, until he saw Top Jimmy, a blues-rock singer whose absorbing, no-holds-barred performances were a legendary part of the local rock scene in the late ‘70s and early ‘80s.

“He sang exactly how I felt things should be sung,” Forrest said, reminiscing about Top Jimmy’s Monday-night shows at the old Cathay De Grande club in Hollywood and the night Top Jimmy came on stage with X at the Greek Theatre.

Forrest hooked up with Monster though guitarist Chris Handsone, a classmate at City College who was putting a band together in 1984. The band quickly became a controversial force on the local scene, thanks to its erratic, unruly shows. A debut album, “You’re Bummin’ My Life Out in a Supreme Fashion,” was released last year on tiny Epitaph Records.

Though the band--whose line-up now also includes drummer Pete Weiss, bassist Rob Graves and guitarist Dix Denney--still has a reputation for being outrageous live, the sound on the new album is quite controlled--the playing almost tasteful much of the time.

Forrest doesn’t see any contradiction between the two approaches.

“I like what we do on stage because we are showing the way we feel at the moment,” he said. “I just can’t stand bands who go up there and play their songs exactly the same as their record. If I go see them live, I want to know more about them. I want to see what they are like. I see it as just being honest.”

Does he see the pop machinery warming up to the album or the band: “I don’t know, but I’d love to be real popular. I don’t think you have to compromise to find an audience. I don’t think the Beastie Boys compromised and they are awfully popular.

“All I’m hoping for now is that we can stay together and maybe I can make a living out of the band. I’ve still got a day job now (dressing sets on movie and video shoots). Sometimes I’m real optimistic about us. Some days, everything seems to go wrong . . . (but other times) I think we are making progress.”

Forrest, who is divorced, also looks forward to some calm in his personal life. He says he is trying to cut down on the drinking.

“There is this Bob Dylan song on his ‘New Morning’ album called ‘Sign on the Window’ that I have been listening to lately . . . about building a cabin in Utah, getting married and catching rainbow trout,” Forrest said, laughing at the sentimentality of the thought.

“I could go for that . . . I know I don’t seem to be very relaxed or content now, but that’s what I’d like. But, then, I guess that is a lot of people’s story, isn’t it.”