MINNEAPOLIS - In the comedy duo of Franken and Davis, Tom Davis says, he was Garfunkel.

The quiet guy, in other words, overshadowed by his flashier partner, Al Franken.

"I would be Deano, he would be Jerry," Davis says, alluding to another famously funny duo, Dean Martin and Jerry Lewis. "If we were Sonny and Cher, he would be Cher."

But now Davis is in the spotlight with his new memoir, "Thirty-Nine Years of Short-Term Memory Loss." Subtitled "The Early Days of SNL From Someone Who Was There," Davis recounts his partnership with Franken that started at a suburban prep school and continued through "Saturday Night Live," where the two were writers and performers, before breaking up in 1990.

Davis, 56, also details his friendship with counterculture legends Jerry Garcia (the two tried unsuccessfully to write a screenplay of Kurt Vonnegut Jr.'s 1959 novel "The Sirens of Titan") and Timothy Leary; his own drug use (he first took LSD watching "2001: A Space Odyssey" with friends at a Twin Cities drive-in); and his travel as a young hippie to India in the 1970s.

His hair and beard now gray and stylishly trimmed, Davis says his stories are those of his generation.

"We all went to India, we all took the acid, we liked the Rolling Stones and the Grateful Dead, we marched against an unpopular war - all those things that make up our generation are well represented in my stories," Davis said.

Davis says he wanted to be candid in his book about his drug use.

"It was amazing, prodigious, and I'm lucky that I did survive it. It was a little reckless, too," he said.

It was at The Blake School where Davis, the laconic Scandinavian who never intended to become a comedian, met Franken, the acerbic Jew. Davis says the two worked well as a team, making announcements at morning chapel, and decided they might have a career together.

"Franken and Davis as a comedy team never really succeeded," Davis said. "So I'm the guy who held Al Franken back for 20 years."