Led by vocalist and songwriter Bob Forrest, Thelonious Monster were a Los Angeles-based rock band whose style found a middle ground between punk and alternative rock with dashes of blues and funk folded in. The group's sound was built on a foundation of guitars -- at one point, they boasted four guitarists -- whose boozy clamor was a fine match for the insightful, streetwise lyrical outlook of Forrest. Thelonious Monster's earliest work (1986's Baby, You're Bummin' My Life Out in a Supreme Fashion) was its most chaotic, and they hit a rough but committed groove on 1989's Stormy Weather, but they began to succumb to their well-documented excesses on their major-label debut, 1992's Beautiful Mess. An older, wiser, and sober Forrest would jumpstart the group in the 2000s for a pair of reunion efforts, 2004's California Clam Chowder and 2020's Oh That Monster.