The Education of Bob Forrest : Drugs and alcohol damaged his career, Forrest says. But Thelonious Monster’s leader is back, upbeat and starting again with a new album--and no excuses.

Bob Forrest, the main creative force behind the rock group Thelonious Monster, says he’s through with excuses.

For six years, Forrest, 31, has written and recorded songs that spoke about post-teen alienation and insecurity with much of the truthful, insightful ring of the Replacements’ Paul Westerberg or Nirvana’s Kurt Cobain.

But three albums and countless live shows failed to lift the Los Angeles band out of the college/alternative rock circuit and into the commercial mainstream.

Sitting in a West Hollywood restaurant, Forrest says he could point to a lot of reasons for the inability to attract more than a cult audience while some old sidekicks--including the Red Hot Chili Peppers--went on to stardom.

However, most of the finger-pointing, he acknowledges, ultimately is directed at himself--a litany of drugs, alcohol and insecurities that led to the band’s break-up and three years between albums.

“I blame myself,” he says flatly, sipping a glass of iced tea. “I made some major mistakes while drunk.”

It wasn’t uncommon in the old days for Forrest to be so drunk on stage that he’d get into fights with his own band-mates or cause havoc with club owners.

One crucial mistake was going on a Los Angeles college radio station two weeks after the release of the band’s last album, 1989’s “Stormy Weather,” and launching into a tirade against his record company, the independent Relativity Records. That didn’t exactly inspire anyone at the company to work hard to promote his album, he says with a shrug.

Whether it was lack of promotion or the inconsistency of Thelonious Monster’s live shows that short-circuited the band’s career three years ago, the album seemed to slip by almost unnoticed even though it was one of the year’s most absorbing collections.

Forrest hopes the same thing doesn’t happen to his new album, “Beautiful Mess,” just released by Signal-Capitol Records.

As song titles like “I’m So Scared” and “Ain’t Never Been Nuthin’ for Me in This World” suggest, the album is another series of soul-searching tunes about relationships and self-doubts.

What distinguishes Forrest’s music is the absence of self-pity. In the tradition of John Lennon, Forrest is capable of expressing irony or anger in a social context, but he recognizes the enemy is often within.

In “Body and Soul,” which was written during a time when Forrest was deeply into drugs and disoriented in his personal life, one can sense the isolation beneath the bittersweet sarcasm:

I sleep with the TV on

So I don’t feel so all alone

This house is a nasty wreck

It’s a perfect match

For its perfect guest.

The album--which includes a Tom Waits guest vocal on one track--was mostly recorded last year in Memphis, but parts of it date to 1990 when he bounced back from the commercial failure of “Stormy Weather” to sign a big-bucks solo contract with RCA Records. It was not a happy time.

Unaccustomed to a hefty bank account, Forrest rented a fancy house in the Hollywood Hills and started buying drugs in serious amounts.

“I was ridiculous with money,” he says, shaking his head as if he still can’t believe his behavior at the time. “I had been fooling around with heroin on the level of $20 or $30 a time, but all of a sudden I had like $50,000 in the bank and I could buy as much as I wanted. That’s what ‘Body and Soul’ is about. I’d drive down and get the heroin and go back and stay in the house all night. It was awful.”

But it was the drug overdose death of Thelonious Monster bassist Rob Graves that finally persuaded Forrest to check into a drug rehab center in March, 1990.

Later that year, he began recording the solo album in Los Angeles, but he describes the sessions as “tortuous and depressing.” At the end, neither he nor RCA was pleased, he says, though the company reportedly had nearly $400,000 invested in the project by then.

Realizing that he works best with his old Thelonious Monster mates, Forrest re-formed the band and went to Memphis with producer Joe Hardy and did more recording--coming up with most of what appears on “Beautiful Mess.”

But RCA still wasn’t satisfied, he says, and Forrest was dropped from the label.

With nowhere to turn, Forrest and the band started playing a series of dates at Al’s Bar in downtown Los Angeles and created a buzz again early this year. Peter Philbin, a former talent acquisition executive at Columbia and Elektra Records, subsequently signed the band to his new Signal-Capitol label.

“I had heard about all the old horror stories about Bob,” Philbin says now. “But I met him and he played me half a dozen songs. They reminded me of a musical Charles Bukowski.”

Since then, Forrest and the band re-signed with their old manager, Lindy Goetz, who also represents the Chili Peppers. The group’s lineup also includes Pete Weiss on drums, Dix Denny and Chris Handsome on guitars and Don Burnet on bass.

Having gone through the RCA money, Forrest is now living in a one-room apartment in Hollywood. But he’s upbeat. The new album is out and the reaction at college radio has been encouraging.

It’s still a long way to the commercial mainstream, but Forrest is looking forward to touring again with the band. Among the key dates: Thursday at the Roxy.

“I’m ready this time,” he says, eagerly. “There really are no more excuses. The funny thing is I always thought you had to get drunk and take drugs to get into this performance stage mode. But I’ve finally found out, after all these years, that the magic is in the music.”