A seventh-grade music class at Saint Ann's School in Brooklyn Heights launched a shy guitar player on a quest for rock and roll stardom. Eric Stuart hasn't made it yet, but along the way he's criss-crossed the country as an opening act for legendary performers as Ringo Starr, Lynyrd Skynyrd, Chicago and Jethro Tull.

Mike Fogarty, his instructor, was a frazzled, out-of-work musician who decided to transform his class into a band, and to hell with teaching scales by rote. Each student chose an instrument, and Fogarty taught the nascent rockers to play compositions by the Who and the Rolling Stones.

"When the summer came, we wanted to keep playing as a band," says Stuart, who has lost track of Fogarty, a Saint Ann's instructor for just one year. "We asked him to teach us more rock and roll songs so we would actually have a full set of music. We played covers of '60s songs and two original tunes."

The precocious 13- and 14-year-olds christened their outfit the Front, after the Woody Allen movie, and made their debut a few months later at Clark Street Station. The bar was packed with soda-guzzling and hamburger chomping teenagers, but only after three gigs, the group broke up. It seems the lead singer could'nt remember the song lyrics.

Stuart, however, found a life. "Once I was introduced to the stage," says the clean-cut rocker, "that was it."

The 31-year-old singer/songwriter-a liflong Cobble Hill resident whose father is a Court Street lawyer and whose mother is chair of Long Island University's dance department-recently put out a promotion four-song CD, which was produced by his mentor, Peter Frampton.

After 15 years of writing acres of songs and performing for tough-to-please crowds at downtown Manhattan clubs, he would appear to be-to paraphrase an Elvis Costello lyric-a whisper from his life's dream of a recording contract.

Since seventh grade, Stuart has been obsessively dedicated to creating powerful music. After the Front broke up, he discovered a recording studio on Montague Street and began experimenting with laying down his own copositions. Eager to perform live, he searched for like-minded classmates to form a band, but most lacked his let's-do-it-right seriousness.

He went out on his own, occasionally playing with two other acoustic guitar players. "I started when I was about seventeen years old and I played the New York scene for years," he says. "That's where most of my growning up was, playing the Mercury Lounge, Kenny's Castaways, the Lion's Den."

He briefly attended college in Washington, D.C., but dropped out to return to writing and performing his music in New York. In 1995, he nudged closer to recognition when he was chosen to open for Chicago. In that instant, the average size of his audience went from 30 to 10,000 people. "They liked what they heard," says the rarely boastful Stuart.

After his success with Chicago, other classic rock acts called on Stuart to warm up their audiences. In the summer of 1997, while opening for Ringo Starr and His All-Starr Band-which included veterans of Cream, Procol Harum and Bad Company-he befriended '70s rock icon Peter Frampton, who was part of the troupe and has since become preeminent in the young musician's musical development. The two talked about collaborating on a project. Frampton wanted to try his hand at producing, and Stuart wanted to record a CD to shop to labels.

Thus the eager kid from Congress Street and former teen idol settled into a Nashville studio, in early 1998, to put down four tracks.

The batch of songs has done well on the Internet-they are posted on www.ericstuart.com-and, oddly enough, in North Caolina. Four Ashville-area radio stations have been playing his "Staring You In The Face" to enthusiastic response. The ever-optomistic singer ever on the verge continues to focus on writing new songs and securing a contract for a full album.

But even if record labels decide he isn't the next big thing, Stuart's already traveled an impressive distance from Mr. Fogary's seventh-grade class.

"When you go backstage after a show and Ringo Starr says to you, "Great show,' it's unbelievable," he says, unabashedly starstruck. "You're thinking, 'A Beatle just told me I played a great show.'"

Peter Duffy/Brooklyn Bridge