Paul McCartney has jokingly blamed Bruce Springsteen for working him too hard.
McCartney told Conan O’Brien on the podcast series Conan O’Brien Needs a Friend, “These days, pretty much there’s a main act and there might be a warm-up act.”
McCartney went on to say that, in the 1960s, “it was a lot of people on the bill … nobody did long sets. Now people will do three or four hours.”
He continued, “I blame Bruce Springsteen – I’ve told him so! I said, 'It’s your fault, man!'”
When O’Brien implied that Springsteen “ruined it for everyone,” McCartney responded, “He did! You can’t even just do an hour. We used to do a half-hour. That was the Beatles' thing: half an hour and we got paid for it!”
McCartney added, “There were a lot of people on the bill. If you were a comedian the promoter would say, ‘How long can you do? Four minutes?’ The guy would say yes, so he would do four. And so we thought, ‘Well, half an hour, that’s like, epic! … It didn’t seem strange.”