Tone Glow 208: The Hated
An interview with Erik Fisher & Daniel Littleton of the '80s emo band about their lifelong friendship, the spiritual reverence their families had for music, and the community that supported them
The Hated
The Hated was an Annapolis, Maryland-based hardcore punk band started by Daniel Littleton and Erik Fisher in 1984. Inspired by the thriving punk scene 30 miles west in Washington DC, the Hated are considered forefathers of the circuitous, sprawling genre known as emo. As children, the two would spend time at each other’s homes listening to music in complete silence. This was a result of their families’ unwavering belief in music’s radical, transformative nature, an idea that animated their own songs, live performances, and underground ethos.
Throughout the past few years, Numero Group has reissued the group’s music and released two compilations titled Best Piece of Shit Vol. 4 (2022) and Flux (2024). On January 15th, 2023, The Hated reunited after nearly 35 years apart for a show at a local fire station. They performed another time at the Numero Twenty festival the following month. This newer iteration of The Hated featured old members and siblings—Mike Bonner, John Irvine, Colin Meeder, Jason Fisher, and Miggy Littleton—but missing was the late Kenny Hill. He was the founder of the crucial record label Vermin Scum, and was a huge supporter of the band before joining in 1985. The Hated’s story, more than anything, is about the desire for deep, meaningful connections, and how underground music scenes can fulfill that need. Joshua Minsoo Kim spoke with Littleton and Fisher between their two performances—on January 22nd, 2023 via Zoom—to discuss their upbringing, the band’s evolution, and the community that supported them along the way.
Joshua Minsoo Kim: I know both of you were childhood friends. Do you recall the first time you two met and what that was like? Do you remember the first impressions you had of each other?
Erik Fisher: I’ve got a ton of memories from Daniel’s house. I believe my very first memory is of the stairs, going into the basement. I think there were two or three of us. It was me and you and my brother, or it was me and you and your brother. There was your sister, Cecilia, who organized us (laughter).
Dan Littleton: True, this is the facts (laughs). My experience of knowing Erik is different because he’s three years older than me. His younger brother Jason and I were born about a month apart from each other and there are pictures of us with my big sister, Cecilia. She and Erik are bigger kids at this point, while Jason and I are babies. The technical response to this question is that I’ve known Erik my whole life, but my first memories in general are of my grandpa in the Philippines, not of my house in Annapolis. At the same time, Erik likely remembers things that I don’t have access to.
We just practiced in that house for this reunion show we did. We decided that we’d never be ready for it so we gave ourselves three days. It was a humorous, ridiculous undertaking, and we did it in this place where we used to practice when we first got together, where we made our first tapes, and where we taught each other shit on the guitar. It was really powerful to be in that space which had so much history and so many points of connection for our friendship and with Jason, and the music that we made as kids, and our first bands up through all the different phases of The Hated. My parents permitted us to do this. I’m glad Erik has those early memories of the house.
Erik Fisher: And we were just reminiscing over this memory we both share, when my mom would bring us over to the Littletons to have dinner. The kids would sneak away and play, and then my mom would come looking for me and my brother. “Come on Erik and Jason, it’s time to go.” But we never wanted to leave, so we would hide (laughter).
Dan Littleton: And we would conceal them! We’d be like, “We thought they were with you.”
Erik Fisher: We’re not here! (laughter). I was asking myself just now, what was the turning point? Daniel and my brother Jason were always best friends, and I was part of the crew, but what was the inflection point when Daniel and I paired off and became these monkish artists? My memory there is of a different house, when your family, Daniel, had moved into your grandmother’s home.
Dan Littleton: Yeah, out on the South River.
Erik Fisher: My mother had given me a journal. It had this medieval artwork on the front and it was just a blank book. She gave it to me and said, “You might want to write in this.” I think I must have made my first entry and, Lord knows why, I brought it with me and shared it with Daniel. The next thing I know, we’re both furiously writing journals, developing our interior lives. We’re eventually sharing with each other. “Read this! I wrote it last week and you’ll understand it!” That really was the turning point, and then music came along soon afterwards.
Dan Littleton: That’s so wild that you can contextualize it in that order. For me, I can see the fucking book! I see the book, and to me the context is that room you’re describing, where me and my brother lived. After my grandfather died, we moved in to be with my grandma and to care for her and support her, and it also helped us out. In that room, I had this three-quarter size nylon string guitar and you had an electric guitar. We sat and wrote our first song together, and I remember what you were writing in—that book. I have the memory of us having a free exchange of ideas and embarking on this examination and exploration of our interior lives, and giving access to each other to what we were about. It was a creative, intimate space, and that’s how we generated our writing partnership.
All of the inputs were firing for each other. It was like life was a perpetual mixtape we were making for each other, to just kind of let each other know what was going down, where we were at, and stuff we wanted to bounce off each other to integrate into what we were doing. The songs started pretty quick. And that really inaugurated the deepening of our friendship. We were family already, but we became creative partners and deeper friends. And Jason also left town to live with his grandparents for a while, so there was also more time that our families would be together and Jason wasn’t in town. There was a little bit of openness, maybe a little bit of weed involved (laughter).
Erik Fisher: Eventually, but not at the beginning.
Dan Littleton: I remember that first songwriting session a little differently than you do (laughter). We had this song, “Celestial Commuters,” and it wasn’t the Mahavishnu [Orchestra] song. It was a dark, dystopian commentary… and it had guitars. Anyways, once you get us going, we get going. Joshua, get in there.
No, this is beautiful. I love being a fly on the wall.
Dan Littleton: That’s good! We have so much history and we haven’t gotten to spend as much time together in many years. It’s a real delight. All this stuff is vivid and accessible right now, even playing these songs that we haven’t played in 30 years—it’s really powerful to enter that sound world that we made together, with all the surviving members being together in one room, just digging in. None of us had been playing this stuff for a really long time. Things are really vivid and firing right now, it’s really cool to bounce off each other.
How old were both of you when this initial journaling started happening?
Dan Littleton: I was probably around 12 and Erik was around 15. I didn’t have an electric guitar at that point. Our journaling was a little before that. I remember that my big sister wrote, too. She and my big brother were both journaling, and my parents both wrote so it followed: “Yeah, I’ll write stuff down.”
Erik Fisher: Just by virtue of our parents being close—both our fathers taught at the same college, both our mothers volunteered together and sang music together—we were always going in and out of each other’s life. We had musical connections before we started making any, just loving the same music.
Where did your mothers sing? Was this at a church or something?
Erik Fisher: Our mothers volunteered at the YWCA. Their two worlds intersected a lot. They were both singers. My mother actually studied opera in Vienna. They both had these incredible soprano voices. We’d go to this little church and they sang and Daniel and I would often be in the choir behind them—they were the singers, we were just sort of backing them up.
Dan Littleton: And my father was playing organ and directing. There was also always music in the home. My mother was Circle Director at the YWCA in the 1970s, and they did a lot of what we’d now call social justice work. It was civil rights work, work around poverty. They got the first women’s shelter in the Annapolis area in the ’70s. That just came while she was working there. She was there for a lot of years before working at the Anne Arundel Community College. There were a lot of opportunities for gathering and doing things throughout our childhood around the platforms they were working on that were really progressive and important. The environment in both of our homes was suffused with music.
Erik Fisher: My dad played every instrument you could name. We really were blessed with a lot of music. When the families would get together, it’d usually be at Daniel’s house. We’d also meet at college functions. There were concerts, folk concerts, and square dancing if you could believe it.
Dan Littleton: The first time I heard Ravi Shankar and Ali Akbar Khan’s music was Erik’s mother playing me a record. Hendrix was a real exemplar for me as a young guitar player, and identity-wise for what he represented. It was so profound what he represented, and Mary could see that I was playing with the instrument in a certain way and she was like, you have to hear this music. She would play me raga! From the greatest practitioners of North Indian classical music.
Hearing that on the record player in the Fisher house was as pivotal for me as when my father played Thelonious Monk and Ellington tunes on the piano. We’d all sit around and hear harmony from him. There was a lot of this sense that music was devotional. Music was part of the elements of life, it was like the food you eat, it was a way you lived. That was something that was part of our collective family cultures, and it was unusual in a lot of respects. That was the foundation, and from that it felt really natural to explore making music together from a really young age. There was just a lot of music in the home. Music was in the home life, it was in the devotional life, and it was in the professional life, and none of them was more exalted than another. It was just like, this is what we do. We were very fortunate on so many levels.
Erik Fisher: It really is remarkable how, on the one hand, it was just second nature for us to have that deep connection to music, to have it infused in our lives, to have it intertwined with the deepest sense of connection and sharing, but also meaning. A typical, random memory that shot into my mind was coming into the Littletons and having Daniel’s little brother Miggy say, “Yeah, we were just listening to these recordings of ’Trane and Ellington with my dad. He made us realize how well behaved John Coltrane is with Duke Ellington.” And we were like, “Oh my god, that’s so true.” That stuff is so smooth and so good, but we stepped back and had this realization. We scanned our mind of all the Coltrane records. “Is there another example of Coltrane playing that gently?”
It’s crazy that this happened when you guys were so young.
Dan Littleton: Yeah, we were always learning. It’s great that you bring up this example, Erik. The other night, my brother just said to me how we had this devotional practice of listening. I don’t want to put so much religious kind of valence in the way I describe it, but I don’t know a clearer analogue to it than people having that kind of spiritual reverence in participating in something. We never talked when we listened to music. It wasn’t in the background. Music was something you were participating in, you were listening with the core of who you were as a person. You were bringing your intelligence, your history, your full attention, and your respect. When you hear the good shit, and when you experience the good shit, you’re fully immersing yourself and are receptive to it. You’re respectful of the opportunity to have that kind of an experience. And that was our life!
Erik Fisher: It was life! Yeah. One of the things that was really distinct for me was that music was a healing space, and this was never conscious. We both had a lot of trauma in our lives, and the very first guitar I bought, I brought it home from a Goodwill. It had four strings and I didn’t realize that it needed to be tuned, but that didn’t stop me—I sat in my bed for hours, just droning on these four strings. And that’s why we didn’t wanna leave the house when we were kids. My dad had left by then so we’d be coming back to a broken home, and I just remember my mom had this stereo. When I started buying records I would just sit on the couch and put Side One on and just listen, and then turn to Side Two. There was this healing, of reconnecting to something that’s kind of broken. Music allows you to commune with your soul in that way and tap into the collective unconscious.
The other thought I wanted to throw in just for spicy contrast was that on one hand, there is this deep reverence. There’s this spiritual-like approach that we approached music with, and that music gave us. We were in the church sometimes, and I was also going to the synagogue with my dad, but it’s important to point out that there was this irreverence. There was this social commentary and the sarcasm. It’s like neti neti yoga—not this, not that. Whenever there’s something that comes up—a doctrine or someone giving a talk to us about how music is important to our lives—we were ruthless and mocked them.
Dan Littleton: Knock it down! Break it down!
Erik Fisher: The last few times we attended and sang in the choir, we would wear our choir robes but also had these combat boots that had spray paint all over them. On the one hand, it’s an expression—if you’re gonna get me, you’re gonna get all of me. And it was because it was a safe space. We let everything out and pointed to the weirdness that our parents may or may not have understood. But they always nurtured it; they let us go crazy. It’s impossible to really pigeonhole.
Dan Littleton: We’re talking about like really young, early formative things. When we got into punk rock, we were ruthless to ourselves and everything else. A lot of the traumas we were dealing with were deeply internal—some of them may have been personal and in the home, while others may have been institutional and cultural or within the environment of where we lived and what was going down. Finding each other with a little bit more experience and being a bit older, with this foundation of, “we wanna make things together, we wanna explore sounds and words and see what we find”… we learned that we needed to find other people. We just needed to reach out of our basements and find connections, to find alliances and collaborative potential with people in our scene and community.
We were able to do more of that, and our early musical collaborations where we had a band were always parallel with stuff that me and Erik did by ourselves. We moved back and forth between the tape player and our practices. We were engaged in our own little Fripp & Eno world, our Clash world, or whatever it was we were trying to learn and absorb and explore—and then we stepped into a space where we had our friends. The amps were going up louder, there were drummers who could play our ideas, we were playing with bass players, we had a singer, and maybe we should sing, too—all that stuff happened, but we weren’t reverent about anything, even the stuff we loved.
Erik Fisher: In addition to building alliances and seeking to work with people, there was a drive to just get stuff out there—it was pure expression. There’s a complete blindness, too. Where’s it gonna go? I think that’s where we really learned, from our audiences, who at first were our families and then our friends and then people who became the scene. The response we got was, “What you guys are doing is so incredible and so deep, it’s so different and transformational.” It invoked in people these experiences that, for us, well yeah! That’s what musical transcendental experience is! (laughter).
But as Daniel said, this is extremely rare, you don’t have two families who come together and have that. We really had this gift we were able to give to people. As it reflected back, it instilled us with a sense of… it wasn’t, “Oh we have something, let’s take it to the moon,” it was, “Wow, we’ve really been entrusted and blessed with something, and it’s really having an effect on people.” There was an impetus to hone that and give that gift.
Do you remember the first time where either of you felt that? When did you realize you were having that sort of impact on people?
Dan Littleton: I think we could talk a lot about this, but one thing that immediately comes to mind is that Erik had written a song that was about apartheid. At the time, we had different experiences of talking about and connecting with resistance to apartheid, of talking about divestment, and taking part in actions. It was hard to do homework because it was hard to find information about what was going on there. Through my older sister, I spent some time with people who had grown up under apartheid in South Africa and were studying in the US. I was getting some real powerful exposure to experiential accounts about what it was like for young Black people growing up in South Africa during this time of total institutional, societally, militarily, police state enforced racism.
We would talk about some of these things and I think Erik wrote this song, “Rubber Bullets,” and we didn’t have a song that was like this. In some ways it was an acoustic song and it felt really punk rock, but he had this idea of finding harmony parts and singing in different parts like a rondo. The lyrics were also really raw and trying to find a way to grapple with this… thing. It was this tremendous, impossible to encapsulate abuse of power. Erik gave words to it as a young person, and in a way that people in our scene, who might have seen themselves as in opposition to what’s going on in their community and the country, and then you talk to some of these people—smart, engaged, pissed-off youth—who didn’t know about what was happening in this part of the world. Erik talking about that was just his response to that, like, we just gotta talk about it.
So compared to a lot of other Hated songs, there is a kind of didactic aspect you could perceive in it, but for us it was urgency and musicality. Erik had challenged us in new ways as people who played music and sang together. We did it on acoustic guitars and when the Hated put out its first 7-inch [No More We Cry (1985)], we put that song on there, and when we came back together and played some show—when Kenny Hill had joined the band and John Irvine was in the band—we met Moss Icon and they were friends of ours. They had just started playing and we did some shows together. It was a really exciting time to find them and to find their music and to find the deep, abiding connection we have with all those people to this day.
We played a show and it was a homeless shelter benefit and I think Tonie Joy of Moss Icon brought it together. A lot of the shows we did locally, I think we were inspired by Positive Force and DC and what was happening there with actions and shows being benefits. We did that early on, locally. It was either a food pantry or homeless shelter-type show where we were collecting food and accepting money and putting that back into the community. Our 7-inch had been out for a while, and the first song we decided to do was “Rubber Bullets.” That’s my memory of it. It was really cool because it was the Hated, Moss Icon, and other local bands on the bill. It was packed. There were a lot of kids at the show—it was wall to wall. When Fugazi came to Annapolis for the first time, they played in that room. There were so many shows that went down in this Unitarian church, who let kids just make the noise we needed to make. It was really cool of them.
We get up there and we start playing “Rubber Bullets” on our acoustic guitars. We got to the chorus of the song and the whole room sang with us, and they sang with us for the rest of the song. It was a few hundred kids, but we’d done shows where there were 15 kids in a parking lot. We watched something develop and change. For me that was a really radical experience of communication. Erik had written this song that we worked on, which had urgency and intention behind it, and tried to confront and speak to something he felt the will and need within himself to do. We just kind of put it out there. As Erik was talking about earlier—where does it go? There’s this inchoate formless space and we’re not savvy about it. We don’t know how information moves.
So there was no real planning involved for how to scale?
Erik Fisher: We were intentionally ignorant. I think we blinded ourselves. The worst thing would be getting picked up by some label and commercialized—we would have lost everything. So we were intentionally anti-commercial in that respect. We had that impulse, which is why we resonated so much with the DC hardcore scene because we were a repudiation of popular culture.
Dan Littleton: We were young and naive about that space too. That intersection of how people find… you couldn’t find alternative media services. Everything was analogue, everything was print media. You had to make zines or find zines to find out about things. You had to listen to Minutemen songs and then run to library to figure out what the fuck the US was doing in Nicaragua and El Salvador. We had to take those little breadcrumb trails, and they were essential to find other things beyond what we were reading in the local press. And then we had to figure out for ourselves what we thought.
There wasn’t a way that we were gonna get to mass culture, except through compromised pop music. But we did want to connect, and we had experiences of connecting. And that was pivotal—the songs were going somewhere. Even at this small level, it was communicating and people were living with the songs. And once we get them out to people’s hands, people can ignore it, they can dance, they can sing along, or they can make their own band. Which is what we did when we heard all those DC bands we loved and all the other musicians who spoke to us. It inspired us. Feeling that kind of feedback loop become more tactile and less abstract, in real time, to experience that this was a song that Erik wrote, and people know it!
I don’t know how special we were… I love what Erik said, but I’m nervous about putting stuff in this way because, I don’t know… it feels special and important to me, but that contact does get made. And when you have that experience as a musician, it is transformative. It feels like contact is possible, communication is possible. It’s not an isolated or isolating experience, even if you write something that comes out of your own alienation. You can have that direct experience and it’s not abstract, it’s in real time. People got the 7-inch and were living with it! And we wanted to do more.
It took me a little while to get past the abstraction of my own mind to see like, oh man. And it really helped, as a younger writer, to have someone like Erik to bounce off of who was making the kind of songs that were on What Was Behind (1986). It made me realize like, oh, punk rock is not just this narrow pathway that has these narrow slogans and songs—it can go to all of these spaces.
I love hearing about all this. Erik, do you have anything you want to share?
Erik Fisher: What Daniel is saying is really amazing and it triggers so many thoughts in my mind. Let me give three instances that gave me this message that we were reaching somebody, though that makes it sound like we were trying to reach somebody. It was more like, our cup was full with this musical heritage, but they were broken—socially, politically, culturally, economically—and so there’s this sense that the world was broken too. On one hand there’s this great tragedy and there’s this enlightened view of how unjust the world always has been and probably always will be. And we’re addressing that. But at the same time, we were coming from a place of deep connection in something greater than us. Music was a bridge to what some may call inner peace, but that’s not even the right frame. It was a connection to a deep sense of knowing and the immediate urgency and suffering. It was kind of like a live wire that would connect.
So here are three instances. One was the show we just played, which was the first in 35 years. There were these three kids in their 20s and they pulled me down and each said something to me. One said, “I’ve learned so much from you.” I don’t know if he was talking about the show or the music that we made or something different, but that just really struck me. Another is that on multiple occasions, we’d ask our friends to volunteer their reactions. And I remember being told multiple times, “As you were playing the show, there were these middle-aged hippies who were pushing their kids in their strollers and stopped and stared with their jaws dropped.” I heard that multiple times, and I don’t know if that was from a genre standpoint or that they couldn’t make sense of it or they were rediscovering something.
A story I wanted to tell is from when we had just released our first tape, or maybe it was just the demos that were floating around. We were in a group of people, it was Friday or Saturday night. We went to a party and we were piling into this all-night delicatessen, Chick & Ruth’s on Main St., and I knew half of the people and the other half I didn’t. I was sitting next to a guy I never met and he was like, “Hey, have you heard of this new band?” “What new band?” “They’re called The Hated.” He talked to me, Joshua, for forty-five minutes about what he thought was unique and powerful about us. It changed my life. I was partly skeptical, partly curious, and we really went deep. I peppered him with questions and he kept coming with answers. I remember that I went home that night and instead of going to sleep I was marveling at this—it was an indication to take this seriously. I may have even taken notes (laughter). Like, what is this person seeing in what we’re doing? Does it make sense to me?
Another theme that Daniel just raised is the idea of responsibility in writing lyrics. It’s kind of ludicrous—I can roll around laughing at myself for taking myself so seriously at the time, but it’s something that’s always been with me. I remember being in that delicatessen at 3 or 4 o’clock in the morning, drinking coffee, and writing words for one of our songs on What Was Behind. You can see that sort of thing in a tortured way in a song like “Pride And Confusion,” where the singer is just completely wrestling with every utterance and move—I was ensnaring myself.
So I wrote a tome for this song and then I realized, “Oh, it kind of sends this message.” It wasn’t right, like this does not represent what I’m struggling with, and I don’t want people to walk away with that. If I were to make fun of myself, I could just adopt a British accent like Pete Townshend: “Do it for the kids!” I was like, “I’m gonna mislead the kids!” And I felt that in my bones, so I completely rewrote the lyrics. And that ties back to this third theme, which goes back to the sarcasm and defiance and how difficult we were. I think just by calling ourselves The Hated, it was sort of a dare. Like, we dare you to dig this, because if you do then there’s probably a good reason for it. If you’re looking for some fad, you can pass on this one.
Dan Littleton: You’re complicit in this! You’re implicated in this! (laughter). We’re all in this strange, semi-coercive relationship to culture and cultural production and we were trying to suss that out as kids. And it’s true and it was funny. It was funny to us. And it was the heart of it. What arrogance on our part to speak of ourselves this way, or to think we could speak to some of the things that we did. But by doing it, it made more and more sense. Erik came with that symbol, that was really. The name of the band on the flag. It was never just a nihilist exercise for us. It was like, how do we speak to our condition, of being in this relationship to identity and powerful culture.
Erik Fisher: I once wrote the lyrics out to one of your songs, “No More We Cry,” in the restroom of an establishment. When it closed, the guy who used to manage it told me, “I went in with a razor blade and cut out that lyrical graffiti and I took it with me.” He told me at our recent show that he still has it.
Who is this?
Dan Littleton: I wanna say that’s David Grobani.
Erik Fisher: Yeah, it is.
Dan Littleton: David Grobani ran the Annapolis Record Exchange, which was a business run by his father [Dr. Anton Grobani], but he was one of the first people who really encouraged us. He took our tapes and told people about them. He sold them at the store, and that space was the cultural epicenter of our lives. We’d just walk in there and it would be the most incredible musical education sitting with that guy. He could make you listen to anything, from Starsailor (1970) by Tim Buckley to punk rock records you never heard of to old folk and blues songs you needed to know. If there was anything you were interested in, his encyclopedic recall and understanding would lead to him being like, “Go over there and pick up this,” and then we’d just listen. We didn’t have an after school program, we had the Annapolis Record Exchange (laughter).
Him and Kenny Hill too, with [record label] Vermin Scum, the two of them really amplified and encouraged us. Before Kenny was in the band, he was helping us. But Grobani, we used to call him our guru because he was such a teacher. He was such a proponent of what we were trying to accomplish, and he also made sure that we had a sense of confidence in what we were about, that it was getting through, that there was potential for us to do something awesome and important together within the underground community. He really encouraged us, and finding people like that made all the difference in the world.
The Hated’s music can be heard at Bandcamp. Numero Group has reissued their music, and has collected some of their work in the compilations Best Piece of Shit Vol. 4 (2022) and Flux (2024).
Thank you for reading the 208th issue of Tone Glow. All the difference.
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