In an interview with Harvey Kubernik for Hits Magazine in 1996, Ginsberg recalled going to New York’s Five Spot Café to hear Thelonious Monk.
Ginsberg claimed that other jazz musicians reacted more sympathetically to the Beat Generation writers, however. In an interview with Harvey Kubernik for Hits Magazine in 1996, Ginsberg recalled going to New York’s Five Spot Café to hear Thelonious Monk. The poet revealed that he supplied Monk and Gillespie with psilocybin from Timothy Leary and said he handed the pianist and composer a copy of Howl to get his critique on it. A fortnight later, the poet claimed he met the jazz man and asked, “What did you think of it?” “Makes sense,” Monk supposedly replied.