The Mops
From The Secret History of the Cedar Valley
History
The Mops was a collaboration between Quentin Duarte and Ed Ware who were pretty much the only two skaters on the entire University of Northern Iowa campus. They used to skate the hill at three in the morning and the bowl sculpture outside Bender and Dancer Hall until skate harassment shut it down. Exhausted from skating from the cops, The Mops took to writing songs about free wheeling and dealing with the scene. They starting off as an acoustic act but quickly started using more and more electric instruments and eventually became the Electric Mops whose set featured a mildly addictive funk rock and rap song called "Skate Rap".
when i first got to C.F. in '83 to the best of my knowledge there were no other skaters...At all! Someone told me about Ed Ware and where he lived. I kept stopping by, but he lived in this third floor apt. I would always be gone by the time he answered the door...When we started thrashin' around C.F. the locales were totally mystified, we used to smoke clove cigs after the bars closed and shoot the hill trying to not run over any drunks. i was glad I had a skate bro...(I had a nasty run in w/some wrestler dudes-its just no good to go it alone.) The Mops was sort of a pun on the British invasion-you know the Beatles thing-butinstead of an insect we were an inantimate object...(and the Beatles sort of had their own "moppy" hair style-thus we called ourselves the Mops... Q. Duarte
Band Members
- Quentin Duarte – Guitar, Vocals
- Ed Ware – Vocals, Guitar, Keyboard, Harmonica
Photos
 Q - Live at Stebs 1984? |
 Ed - Live at Stebs 1984? |
