The truth to you I'll tell/It's milk & cheese & cream/I've known 'em all my days.
Other Wisconsinites might have deemed the milky lyrics for Bob Dylan's unfinished "On, Wisconsin" a tad, um, cheesy. Those lines, however, are part of what helped Trapper Schoepp fall in love with the song, making him an unlikely collaborator with Dylan 57 years after the tune was penned.
"The town I grew up in literally reeked of cheese because of the big co-op creamery there," said Schoepp, who's from Ellsworth in western Wisconsin, the Cheese Curd Capital of the World. "Those lyrics certainly rang true to me."
Now based in Milwaukee and a frequent visitor to the Twin Cities, Schoepp first heard about "On, Wisconsin" when the hand-scrawled lyrics went up for auction in 2017. Dylan never actually recorded or performed the song, so — in the vein of Wilco and Billy Bragg's "Mermaid Avenue" albums of new music for old Woody Guthrie lyrics — Schoepp set about coming up with his own version.
Of course, unlike Guthrie, Dylan is still alive, and he's not exactly known as a frequent songwriting collaborator. But that's how he's credited on Schoepp's new album, "Primetime Illusion," produced by Wilco's Pat Sansone and featuring "On, Wisconsin" as its closing track.
Calling from Milwaukee ahead of his 7th St. Entry gig Saturday (the day after his new record's release date), Schoepp excitedly recounted "all the serendipitous circumstances" that led to him finishing "On, Wisconsin" and getting approval from Dylan to put it out in the world.
"My manager Glen Phillips just happened to run into his manager Jeff Rosen at an event, and it snowballed from there," Schoepp said. "That was one of the many ways the stars just seemed to align on this."
Perhaps it was written in the stars when Schoepp, now 27, first saw Dylan in concert at age 14 at Warner Park in Madison, Wis., and Mayo Field in Rochester, Minn., during the rock legend's 2004 ballpark tour with Willie Nelson.