People who like to use pretentious German words to describe things have a name for it: zeitgeist, literally “time-spirit,” a unique experience that results from being in a certain place at a certain time. All of the singular events that have changed the world could only have occurred when and where they did, and never otherwise, from the discovery of fire to the space race. There was only one Pericles, only one Jesus, only one Siddhartha, only one Hitler, only one Elvis, and whereas the rise of democracy and monotheism and global war and rock and roll may well have happened anyway in some form, none of them would have taken shape as they did in other crucibles and in other hands.

Live from New York: It is no accident, for example, that punk and “Saturday Night Live” broke out at the same time. Both were experiments in anarchy and rebellion that emerged as the smoke cleared over Vietnam and the institutions of the Greatest Generation were judged to be hopelessly broken, the dissenting cries of the hippies and radicals judged to be ultimately hollow. Punk only truly existed for a couple of years and was dead by 1979 (and even then, it lived longer than by rights it should have). “Saturday Night Live,” in the only form that truly mattered, ran from 1975 to 1980. Yes, there’s a show on TV to this day that bears the name, but it will never be as defiant, as relevant, or as flat-out funny as that one was in the post-Nixon years. The first three seasons are available on DVD now and they hold up beautifully. Eddie Murphy was funny, Phil Hartman was brilliant, and I’d gladly eat bees for Tina Fey, but they all showed up too late. On the other hand, no matter how many shitty movies Chevy Chase and Dan Aykroyd make, they’ve already earned their place in heaven. As the saying goes, ya hadda be there.

Comedian and writer Tom Davis was there. In fact his memoir is called Thirty-Nine Years of Short-Term Memory Loss: The Early Days of SNL from Someone Who Was There (Grove/Atlantic, 2009), and being there was enough. Davis’ book is a candid and frequently funny examination of his life leading up to, and away from, and back to "SNL," a life often lived accidentally and not always well, but completely in the grip of the zeitgeist.

In a rambling approach more akin to a scrapbook of memories than a linear narrative, Davis takes us from his Minnesota boyhood, chafing under the rules and regs of his archconservative father to his first encounters with girls, drugs and the short kid who would change his life, Al Franken. Yes, that Al Franken. From the ’60s to the ’80s, the comedy team of Franken & Davis played clubs and campuses all over. They were part of the first wave of comedians who cut their teeth on the fledgling club circuits in New York and L.A. in the early ’70s, and their penchant for bizarre sketch comedy (their “Brain Tumor Comedian” bit is still funny) caught the attention of Lorne Michaels, who hired them on a provisional basis for his new late-night comedy show on NBC. For the next five years Davis ran with Aykroyd (the first chapter tells how their acid-fueled trip to Easter Island inspired the Coneheads), Belushi, the Rolling Stones and his heroes the Grateful Dead. During those years and afterward, Davis became good friends with Timothy Leary and Jerry Garcia, with whom he was working on a film adaptation of Vonnegut’s The Sirens of Titan.

There are as many lows as highs in Davis’ book, however. As he collaborates with Garcia, Davis is also witness to the spiraling heroin addiction that helped kill him. Davis is unflinching as he tells of spending the night in the Chateau Marmont bungalow where Belushi died, or watching Chris Farley self-destruct. He pulls no punches about his dysfunctional relationships with women, his bosses, his partner and with himself. Whether it’s the week he spent sick, broke and stranded in India or the many times he pissed off all the wrong people in Hollywood, Davis spares himself nothing.

It’s not the most artfully written memoir out there. As a writer, Davis is much better at the six-minute sketch than he is at extended prose, and his tone vacillates between fluidity and flatness. If one can ignore the inconsistencies, though, what one gets is a remarkable look at the life of a young wild talent who blundered into a pocket revolution and played a crucial role in changing the shape of American comedy. Most people reading this may be too young to remember the world before “Saturday Night Live,” but those of us who were there know just how big a deal that was.

News and Notes: And because some stories are just so tragic that they just have to keep going, the Associated Press reported that on Mar. 16 Nicholas Hughes, a biologist and the son of poets Ted Hughes and Sylvia Plath, committed suicide by hanging at his home in Fairbanks, AK. His mother, author of the novel The Bell Jar, is known as much for her own suicide as for her writing, and her name has become something of a shorthand for a figure of poetic despair. It is widely believed that Plath’s suicide in 1963 was precipitated by her breakup with Ted Hughes, poet laureate of England, after she discovered his affair with Assia Wevill. Wevill and Hughes married, but then Wevill took her own life in 1969. The deaths of both women were a source of anguish for Hughes for the remaining 30 years of his life. It is unclear what precipitated Nicholas Hughes’ suicide, but his sister Frieda, also a poet, issued a statement citing Nicholas’ ongoing battle with depression.

Aside from the many sorrowful aspects of this story, it should serve as a reminder that clinical depression is a physiological and usually genetic condition that afflicts more of us, and more deeply, than we’d care to admit.

John G. Nettles