How Pasquale Rotella Built His Rave Empire

But the family struggled. They even lived in a youth hostel near the beach for a spell while Irene and Vincent Rotella "worked to get us back into the Palisades," their son recalls. Young Pasquale bussed tables and cleaned up at the Venice deli, but for the most part, he says, he was "unsupervised on the Venice boardwalk," break-dancing as an eighth grader, showing other kids "what's up" on the cardboard mats of Ocean Front Walk. He also joined a tagging crew.

He was part of a lost generation of street-smart white kids — including Venice's "Z-Boys" skate team and surfing's Strider Wasilewski — who grew up on the Westside when it still had some grit.

"I used to wear Dickies pants and white T-shirts and Raiders' Starter jackets," Rotella says. "My mom would give me a meatball in tinfoil for lunch. I wasn't a bad kid at all, but I just couldn't pretend I had a white picket fence. ... I was an outcast in the Palisades. The kids' parents didn't let them come to my house."

PHOTO BY ERIK KABIK

Smooch: Newlyweds Holly Madison and Pasquale Rotella

PHOTO BY NANETTE GONZALES

Todd DeStefano

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More About

• Pasquale Rotella
• Reza Gerami
• Todd DeStefano
• Insomnia
• Crime and Law

But his success today is a real contrast to some of his wealthier peers: "The families there were afraid of me, but a lot of their kids ended up getting into heroin."

When early rave music hit Los Angeles at the dawn of the '90s, it was an epiphany for Rotella. The sound captured the urban grit of electro music (his break-dancing soundtrack), featured street art in its visuals and adopted the neon smiley-face fashion of England's acid-house scene. The 1960s psychedelia of Bill Graham's Grateful Dead concerts and Tom Wolfe's literary accompaniment, The Electric Kool-Aid Acid Test, were updated with new sounds and new drugs. Acts like Prodigy, Altern-8 and 2 Bad Mice mixed tough-guy breakbeats with futuristic synth sounds.

Rotella was all over it.

"It was happy music," he says. "And it had some hip-hop culture behind it."

While Rotella is today a multimillionaire, he still brings the swagger in a T-shirt, backpack and stiff-billed Edmonton Oilers baseball cap — all black. He has the cold gaze of someone who has some street experience. Which he does: As a teenager he ran with some tough Eastside party crews, joining one called Latin Pride. His wasn't Bill Graham's street-hustling, foster-kid Bronx childhood, but you can see the roots of his egalitarian, for-the-people stance.

"The one thing people didn't appreciate about Bill, and the one thing Pasquale admires, is [that they] care about the audience experience," Pollstar's Bongiovanni says. "Having worked with Bill in the early days, I understood his passion to make sure the hot dogs were fresh and the restrooms were clean. He was concerned with the environment he was putting audiences in."

More often than not, a young Rotella would end up at an underground party near downtown called La Casa, a venue in the 18th Street gang territory.

"I remember getting patted on my head at La Casa one night," he says, "and someone said, 'Shouldn't you be home by now, kid?' I would wear top hats, giant overalls and Dr. Martens, fill my backpack with lollipops, and go to the events and dance like crazy. It was the best time of my life."

In 1992, as an 18-year-old, Rotella opened the doors to his own party, Unity Groove. Reza Gerami, whose Go Ventures would later become Insomniac's chief competition, remembers Rotella as a teenager "handing out fliers in his little orange jacket with his sideburns and baggy rave jeans." Promoter Foo recalls partnering up early on for a party with Rotella — and Rotella putting his older sister on the cash register at the door.

Rotella was getting his start even as the underground rave scene looked to be winding down. By 1992, rave culture was on the front page of the Los Angeles Times but not for good reasons: In March three young men were found dead in a parked pickup truck, victims of nitrous oxide. Rave fliers were found in the vehicle.

Party crews and Eastside gangsters were starting to infiltrate the scene and, in Rotella's words, turn things "dark." By the last day of that year, when promoter Gary Richards brought the culture to new heights by hosting a rave for more than 17,000 people at Knott's Berry Farm, the bubble seemed to burst. The party was legendary, sure, but people crashed the gates as police in riot gear tried to stop the madness. Knott's would never again host a rave.

"The scene died," Rotella says. "Rave became a bad word."

But even as the Orange County white kids who kept the underground afloat slunk home, Rotella decided to dive in, hosting weekly $5 events. He called them Insomniac, and when 500 people started showing up, he raised the price to $7. It was 1993.

His parties were a hit, and Rotella learned an important lesson he carries with him today: It's all about the venue. A contact who worked in real estate would give him the keys to unused spaces, allowing Rotella to move Insomniac from week to week.

"I did some break-ins," too, he recalls. "I was arrested twice."