Was Steve Carlesi a good producer?

[JoeCumiawearsDIAPERS]

Listening back to old shows, Steve always seemed to care about his job and was a genuinely nice guy who happened to be in a toxic work environment that Opie and Anthony deliberately fostered.

The shit culture empowered rats and bottom feeders like Sam Roberts to be openly disrespectful and insubordinate in on air and behind the scenes.

I don’t know the whole situation with Foundry Music owning the O&A catalog but I know he did himself no favors with O&A going through that whole ordeal.

So keep me honest here - was he actually good?

 

[BonnieMcFarlaneMe2]

I believe he paid for the site which hosted all their videos and pictures so he watermarked them. I’m assuming they were too cheap or dumb to think it was worth it for them to pay. Also Foundry was broken up by then or not making music so I don’t really understand that part of it either.

 

[Rutherford_b_Blaze]

YESSSSS

 

[Naked_Militiaman]

I went down to the Foundry store
Where I'd heard the Virus years before
But the widow said the interns would all paaaaay

 

[Bernard Murphy]

I believe he paid for the site which hosted all their videos and pictures so he watermarked them. I’m assuming they were too cheap or dumb to think it was worth it for them to pay. Also Foundry was broken up by then or not making music so I don’t really understand that part of it either.

I could be wrong, but I also think Steve had either the old master tapes of the days before XM, or he had personal recordings of them that older radio stations/XM didn't, which XM would have the legal right to play, but the only copy existed with Steve. The speculation was that Opie did the Opie thing and began to distance from Steve, and during that time they asked for the old tapes Steve held onto for best ofs and shit. Steve in response wanted to cash out, knowing his time there was coming to an end.

Like I said, I could be dead wrong, but that's what I understood as a loose timeline of what happened. Feel free to correcT the record if I'm wrong.

 

[BonnieMcFarlaneMe2]

I could be wrong, but I also think Steve had either the old master tapes of the days before XM, or he had personal recordings of them that older radio stations/XM didn't, which XM would have the legal right to play, but the only copy existed with Steve. The speculation was that Opie did the Opie thing and began to distance from Steve, and during that time they asked for the old tapes Steve held onto for best ofs and shit. Steve in response wanted to cash out, knowing his time there was coming to an end.

Like I said, I could be dead wrong, but that's what I understood as a loose timeline of what happened. Feel free to correcT the record if I'm wrong.

Maybe that’s why XM ended up removing his position altogether. How many years into satellite did he last? At least into the merger.

 

[Bernard Murphy]

Maybe that’s why XM ended up removing his position altogether. How many years into satellite did he last? At least into the merger.

I don't remember exactly. I'm trying to think of the show where they started it bitching (so about 50% of their library), where Opie brought it up briefly by yelling a sentence or two about it (didn't say his name). I think that is the last mention I remember until his suicide.

 

[Bernard Murphy]

Maybe that’s why XM ended up removing his position altogether. How many years into satellite did he last? At least into the merger.

Here we are:

 

[MarianCruise]

YESSSSS

N-N-N-N-N-N-No

 

[LingerLonger]

O&A couldn't have a website for legal reasons. Steve C had Foundry for his band and so he started putting everything O&A related on the site. I mean everything. Every single news story they discussed had the video on Foundry. Song parodies. Bits. Podcasts. Random footage of the show behind the scenes. It was all archived on Foundry. And Steve watermarked everything with a giant Foundry logo hilariously. You can still find random videos on YouTube that people got from Foundry that have nothing directly to do with O&A. Erock or Opie likely have a few terrabytes of digitized stuff all the way back to the WBAB days and before.


There was once this story of a young kid in Australia throwing a house party and it causing a big scene to the point where international news picked up the story. Steve C said he had the kid on the phone the next day to talk to O&A so they interviewed the kid on air. But the next day it turned out that it was just a listener pretending to be the kid and goofing on Steve C and O&A for being gullible. So they would rip on Steve for booking various guests and having people on the phone. "I have Tom Cruise on the phone" or "I have Abraham Lincoln" on the phone in Steve's gay voice impression.

Steve also brought some 'documentary' to them where a guy stands in front of a canvas and someone shoots him with a gun and the blood sprays on the canvas as an art project. But they had to keep the shooting secret as it was illegal to shoot someone even for art. Turned out the documentary was entirely a hoax but Steve stupidly bought into it and presented it like it was legitimate. "I'm tell you it's real". So everyone goofed on him yet again for not being able to tell real from fake.

 

[Torque’sHeadBump]

I think he was good. I fawkin’ loved Steve.

He definitely took his beatings from his bosses but Sam and Danny treated him like absolute shit. That never was appealing to me, especially how Sam bullied him.

 

[Voscabulary]

I wish steve had beaten danny to a bloody, broken pulp and then hanged himself in his prison cell instead of just regularly committing suicide

 

[Mr. Faggotry]

He was a terrible producer but he was absolutely right on the Foundry hosting argument. Listening to Norton talk about it was infuriating, on par with him wondering if it was even possible to get podcasting equipment into the city.

Steve hosted all of their content for free, for years, and they shit on the guy relentlessly for wanting to be paid for that. They even discounted what having a web and video presence meant in the mid/late 2000s. Much like wanting to get a podcast started in 2014, like it would have been revolutionary.

If anything Steve was arguably the best marketer of the entire brand.

 

[ShockJockRobot]

Opie and Anthony completely fucked Steve over on the Foundry hosting shit...

 

[Maybe even kiss you]

N-N-N-N-N-N-No

What's MY problem? You're in MY fawkin house!

 

[Roslyn Vampire]

He was a terrible producer but he was absolutely right on the Foundry hosting argument. Listening to Norton talk about it was infuriating, on par with him wondering if it was even possible to get podcasting equipment into the city.

Steve hosted all of their content for free, for years, and they shit on the guy relentlessly for wanting to be paid for that. They even discounted what having a web and video presence meant in the mid/late 2000s. Much like wanting to get a podcast started in 2014, like it would have been revolutionary.

If anything Steve was arguably the best marketer of the entire brand.

Opie, Anthony and Jim's biggest problem was that they were lazy and had inflated self-worth towards the end of the show, especially once they moved over to Sirius' building from their own studio in the XM days.

Opie's laziness came from having two kids and feeling like his life was set. He also (very incorrectly) believed that he would be hirable on some other radio station or platform if the show broke up. Think about the times he told Nana during a fight that he could go do something else and Nana would reply "what spinning records?". Recently, he said that he was offered a job on WABC-AM for $100k/year to do a solo show. I think he thought he was Scott Shannon who would flourish without his old partner.

Anthony is extremely lazy and his post OnA "career" demonstrates this perfectly. He wanted to do a show where he would he was the main attraction but cared nothing for the details other showing up and talking (and he can't even show up on time). He delusions of grandeur made him believe that he should have a network and not just a show. Now we know his bid for a network was more a plea for friends, sycophant's and hangers on than for a platform.

Jim will tell you (genuinely) that he is not lazy and point to his road gigs, acting gigs, side character podcasts and Tonight Show appearances. And yeah, he definitely puts in the time but are those hours actually helpful? Are they the best way for him to further his career? The best case in point of his laziness and deluded sense of worth is the Chip cartoon. He saw Bill Burr have a cartoon and then thought he should have one too even though he had no idea what made a cartoon good. He was too lazy to learn what made a cartoon work and too delusional to bring in someone to help him who knew what they were doing (he did of course bring in Jenny Carm because he will always be addicted to her).

 

[BootyJuice]

I wish Danny Ross was dead.

 

[ShockJockRobot]

Now we know his bid for a network was more a plea for friends, sycophant's and hangers on than for a platform.

I will always believe that the whole platform thing was 100% Keith.

Without KtC it would have just been AntH doing TACS/LFTC and it never would have moved beyond the compound basement.

Though once he had the network it absolutely became his surrogate social life.

 

[Zombie247]

RIP Steve



The bitter, worthless Jew. Will be back.

Hi Danny

 

[DMAN]

This whole "Steve was a good guy" thing is crazy to me.

Steve was a smut-pusher, basically an e-Pimp who would recruit teenage girls to become webcam whores decades before OnlyFans became mainstream.

He was a sleazeball. This misconception that Steve was being a saint, paying for O&A out of his own pocket is nonsense. Steve was ROLLING in money that he made online back in the heyday by plugging his site on WNEW (and syndicated spots) to sell camgirl content, which he then spent peanuts on the hosting. Steve was double dipping off the O&A brand.