After the NBC-TV series The Monkees premiered in the fall of 1966, Peter Tork, Davy Jones, Mickey Dolenz and Mike Nesmith, the four zanies cast as pseudo-Beatles, became recording stars too.

It seemed to bother no one that the actors on the show sang but did not play the instruments for their records. (A backup band did.) It did disturb Tork, a guitarist who wanted to be taken seriously as a musician. The son of an economics professor at the University of Connecticut, Tork (né Thorkelson) was a folk singer who had played the coffeehouse circuit before the series.

In 1968 he left the group to make it on his own. The millions he made as a Monkee did not last long. "I gave a lot of money away to friends, on the theory that it would come back to me in the long run." In 1972 he hit bottom. He was arrested for possession of hashish and served four months in a federal prison.

Today, at 34, Tork has his act together at last. Since September he has been teaching English, math, drama, Eastern philosophy and "Rock Band Class" at Pacific Hills, a private secondary school in Santa Monica, Calif. A college dropout, Peter got the job on the strength of his interview with Dr. Penrod Moss, the school's director. "I like to hire people who are independent and creative," Moss said. "I was impressed by his personality and his ability to talk."

Instead of the splendid Wally Cox house in Studio City he once owned, Peter now lives in a three-room house in Venice, Calif. with his daughter, Hallie, 6, from his first marriage, his live-in lady, Barbara Iannoli, and their 8-week-old son, Ivan Iannoli-Thorkelson.

While Tork the musician still has dreams of one day returning to the rock circuit, Thorkelson the teacher is happily planning his next course, "Mao, Marx and Mama." "I'm doing something important," he says. "I never do anything less than important."