The National's Matt Berninger Accidentally Causes Airport Evacuation
- Posted on Jun 25th 2010 11:15AM by Charley Rogulewski
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The Indie Rock Terrorism Alert seems to be at an all-time high. While Eels' Mark Oliver Everett was recently mistaken for a terrorist at London's Hyde Park, Spinner has learned that another indie rocker faced such allegations. On a recent trip to AOL's Los Angeles headquarters, the National's Matt Berninger revealed that he was taken into federal custody at Honolulu's airport because of a misunderstanding.Following a rigorous overseas press schedule -- these stories always seem to start this way -- with bandmate Aaron Dessner behind the band's new album 'High Violet,' a jetlagged and exhausted Berninger was to meet his wife and one-and-a-half-year-old daughter for what he calls their "first official family vacation" in Kauai. After a seven-hour flight from Tokyo, waiting for his connection in a massage chair with a muffin in one hand and coffee in the other, Berninger could almost feel the mist of Kauai's many waterfalls on his face when things went wrong.
"Suddenly I hear my name being called," he tells Spinner, "and my name's flashing on all the monitors, and I was supposed to report to security." His next thought was only natural. "I sat in the massage chair. I was kind of hoping that maybe I could finish this 15-minute massage chair thing first then realized that maybe I shouldn't." So he approached the security desk where the woman behind the counter told him, "Sir, I can't help you right now. They're evacuating the airport."
This is where Berninger, the deep baritone that has people attach words like "melancholy" and "dark" to the indie rock band with Ohio roots, realized that perhaps "there's something going on." Outside, as he was watching people clear the airport, the cause of the situation dawned on him.
"I had bought a novelty clock in Tokyo, some sort of MacGyver, goofball alarm clock that happened to look exactly like a bomb. And it was in my suitcase," he says, describing the memento he bought for a pal. "I had the Honolulu Airport evacuated for about 45 minutes. I ultimately had to surrender the alarm clock to the TSA but they were very pleasant and professional. They had done a great job and I thanked them and they let me go." With everything cleared up, Berninger apologizes to anyone at the airport that may have missed their connecting flights that day.
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