I met Michael Bloomfield at his uncle's pawn shop, on Clark Street on the North Side of Chicago. I picked up a guitar and started hittin' a couple of blues licks when this real energetic kid about my age jumped over the counter, grabbed another guitar and just started playin' some hell of a shit all over the fingerboard. I said, "Wow!" I didn't see him for quite a while, until Paul Butterfield got his band [the Paul Butterfield Blues Band] together. "Bloomers" had been playin' in bands since he was twelve or thirteen -- all kinds of bands, playin' jazz and swing music to rock & roll. Clapton said, "He was music on two legs." He was consumed with it, just burning up.

From the first, even when we didn't know too many tunes or didn't have the arrangements down too good, Bloomers and Butterfield would get up there on the stage and they'd just burn. On a good night, Bloomers had an endless supply of shit that would come out of that fingerboard. He used to do shit onstage that was totally amazing. He got one of those things that the fire-eaters use in the circus. We'd play most of [the Butterfield Blues Band's] East-West, and it was so exotic and strange sounding -- it hit right with what was happening socially and with the LSD at the time. So minds were blowin' anyway, and then he'd put his guitar down, dip the fire-eatin' shit in some lighter fluid and get up there and swallow the fire for a while as the band was keepin' the groove behind him. People would just fall out.