Eric Blowtorch’s Shameless Bopaganda!

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Eric Blowtorch has worked with a roster of great Jamaican musicians, recording with reggae aces such as U-Roy, Big Youth, Prince Jazzbo, Clement “Sir” Coxsone Dodd and Roland Alphonso. The remarkable thing is that Blowtorch doesn’t hail from Kingston or Montego Bay but Milwaukee’s East Side. His encounters with the musicians he admires weren’t random. “It was a conscious pursuit,” he says.

Blowtorch has also recorded with members of Fishbone and, closer to home, with esteemed Milwaukeeans such as Paul Cebar, Robyn Pluer, Paul Finger and a gamut of rock, jazz, R&B and genre-bending players. Collaboration has been operative throughout Blowtorch’s 30-plus years of making records, a working method in keeping with the communitarian socialism that permeates his lyrics.

Eight albums, nearly a dozen singles and another dozen tracks on compilation albums—and he’s still not a household name in his hometown.

Well, household names aren’t what they used to be. Stardom was never as important to Blowtorch as doing good work—on stage, in the recording studio and in the community where he lives. Blowtorch is incredibly passionate, and while thoroughly articulate, he scatters words like sparks from a Roman candle when excited by an idea, and excitement comes easily to him.

Blowtorch’s apartment is crammed to the rafters with evidence of his interests. Crates of LPs rise to the ceiling, shelves of books, 78 RPM records (he spins Elvis’ “Mystery Train” to demonstrate how much stronger it sounds in that format) and a rack of hats for a vintage hipster look. His enthusiasm for music, culture and politics is boundless.

Punk, Reggae, Hip Hop

When still in high school, Blowtorch (also known by his given name, Eric Beaumont) hopped the No. 15 bus from Whitefish Bay to the East Side, where he discovered, in rapid succession, punk rock, reggae and hip hop. His first band, The Laytons, were punks searching for the funky reverberations of Jamaican dub. Experiencing hip hop up close in segregated early ‘80s Milwaukee meant “crossing artificial boundaries because I wanted to meet hip hop musicians. I didn’t belong visually in the hip hop world, but all the brothers blessed me—and the sisters too!” he says.

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In 1984, Blowtorch encountered a mentor in one of Milwaukee’s most respected bandleaders, Paul Cebar. “Meeting Cebar changed everything,” Blowtorch recalls. “He’s very politically and culturally astute. He also understands how sex and music are intertwined, and that humor is critical …Cebar expanded my understanding of culture and America’s place in culture. He was always so generous with his time.” Blowtorch recalls sitting with Cebar at El Matador till closing time, listening to him explain the history of New Orleans marching bands and Black literature.

Blowtorch’s recording career began in earnest in 1990 with the release of his first album, Shame a Politician, marking the debut of his own label, Bopaganda! He hasn’t stood still for long ever since. “I feel privileged to practice what I preach,” he insists. “I wanted my music to make people feel the way I did when I heard Springsteen, The Who, The Clash, the people who convicted me and touched my heart.”

The name Bopaganda! is a pronouncement: what you are about to hear in these grooves is politics from an old-school hipster’s stance. “Even if you don’t recognize it, everything is political. How you treat your friends is political,” Blowtorch says. “Personal politics can emanate from love and sympathy.”

Blowtorch identifies himself as a democratic socialist. “Living Larger than Life” from his 2009 album The Alphabet is a tribute to how Milwaukee’s old-time socialists made the city a beautiful place to live. “I try to paint pictures, tell stories, even write short cinematic pieces,” Blowtorch says of his lyrics. His 2023 song “Sanctuary City” opens with the line “Clouds over the caravan.” “That hopefully prompts an image in the listener’s mind and engages their natural curiosity about what the people in the caravan are trying to escape. And why there are infants making this brutal journey,” he explains. Lyrics are vital but inseparable from the music. “It helps to have a pretty melody and a driving rhythm,” he adds. 

Music’s Not Enough

Words and music alone aren’t enough. Blowtorch has always been willing to roll up his sleeves for a better society. In the ‘90s he joined the staff of Silver Spring Neighborhood Academy, “working with kids in risk of academic failure. I had to earn their trust, give them time to vent. I was in it to win with those kids.” His song “God’s Little Girl” is “all about what those kids are going through—how do you offer hope?” He worked as a librarian at Milwaukee County Jail from 2003 through 2009.

“On my first Christmas as jail librarian, I joined a choir put together by Catherine Sidney, the jail chaplain, in singing Christmas carols to the folks living in the jail. I brought my Great Grandpa Albert’s old Harmony, the guitar I first learned on. We went to quite a few housing units, which housed up to 64 people each … One of our last stops was a woman’s housing unit. While we were singing ‘Silent Night,’ I looked up and almost everyone in the balcony was crying. I thought about these women's kids, their grandkids, their folks—in my whole life singing, I never felt more like this is what I was put here to do.”Blowtorch is now a paralegal working with the incarcerated at the Milwaukee Secure Detention Facility, helping them apply for public benefits and navigate critical aspects of their release.

Along the way, he found time to collaborate with his dad, Roger A. Beaumont, a history professor at Texas A&M, on a three-act musical called The Ethiopian Ball. Inspired by records of an actual dance party held by emancipated Black women in 1782, it was recorded for broadcast on WMSE by a host of prestigious Milwaukeeans including jazz singer Adekola Adedapo, Milwaukee Symphony Orchestra violinist Glenn Asch, Kings Go Forth trumpeter Eric Jacobson and many more. Since its 2015 debut on WMSE, The Ethiopian Ball has been aired in Charleston, SC, Portland, OR and elsewhere in the U.S. Blowtorch drew on Gilbert and Sullivan, infused it with touches of blues and gospel. The melodic, rhythmic quality of his father’s lyrics were a delightful shock, Blowtorch said at the time the musical debuted. 

His most recent album, 2021’s Quality Items, was a triple LP. And there’s no end in sight. “Some people have kids. I have records,” he says. “I want to leave something that lasts."