Event

Trapper Schoepp

BIOGRAPHY
In 2019, Milwaukees Trapper Schoepp hit a songwriters jackpot: a co-write with Bob Dylan. And the circumstances were wildy serendipitous. On the day Dylan entered Columbia Studios in 1961 to begin recording his first studio album, he wrote a song about Wisconsin. The lyric sheet sat unseen with a former roommate, and was later unearthed and put up for auction at $30,000. Schoepp saw the story and seized the opportunity to set music to words. After Schoepps effort, he was granted Dylans approval to jointly publish the song. This 57-year-collaborationOn, Wisconsinled to features in Rolling Stone and Billboard, an album called Primetime Illusion produced by Wilcos Patrick Sansone, and nearly a hundred international tour dates. But other ventures in the singer-songwriters life werent as fulfilling.

Schoepp spent the summer prior to the release of Primetime Illusion at the Hotel Astor, a historic 1920s hotel he describes as having the air of a haunting Stephen King novel. Indulging in the spookiness of his transient lodgings, Schoepp went on a ghost tour of Milwaukee, and as the specters saw fit, the tour ended back at the very hotel where he was staying. The guide shared the story of a 1935 fire that claimed the lives of a nurse and her patient, a deaf man who did not wake to the nurses pounding at his door. With creative liberties, Schoepp reimagined their story into Hotel Astor.