How Pasquale Rotella Built His Rave Empire

Police raided his parties countless times. But Insomniac quickly became one of the only true, positive-vibe raves in town, drawing 1,200 people a week. At its one-year anniversary in 1994, Insomniac brought 4,000 people downtown to the old Shark Club.

Daniel Wherrett, better known as DJ Dan, met Rotella and started spinning for him about that time. He says the promoter immediately struck him as unusually passionate about the stages, lighting and theatrics at his parties. Rotella would ask to come by Dan's studio to talk party planning in the middle of the week.

"He never stopped thinking that the next one could be bigger than the last show," Wherrett says. "He is genuinely into it."

Go Ventures' Reza Gerami

PHOTO BY NANETTE GONZALES

L.A. Coliseum: Home of the rave?

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More About

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

At other parties, methamphetamine was taking over. Gangsters were invading wholesale. An event called Grape Ape 3 at Orange County's Wild Rivers theme park concluded with fights, guns displayed and a van set on fire. In 1994 the weekly party known as Sketchpad in Rampart Village was so meth-crazed that people ended up strewn on the floor passed out as the sun came up. "That was a nightmare scene," Rotella says, "everything I was against."

He saw his own lows. Someone he trusted swiped $3,000 in profits he had saved up, he says, to help his mom and dad pay rent.

But Rotella had found something positive in his life — rave's mix of music, street art and huggy feelings — and he wasn't about to let go. In February 1995, he organized a party billed as "Insomniac Presents Nocturnal Wonderland" in East L.A. It sold out, becoming Insomniac's signature, annual event.

Slowly, he was bringing raving back into fashion. Rotella helped organize Organic '96 in the San Bernardino Mountains, a before-its-time mix of Coachella-style crowds and European dance-music massives, featuring the Chemical Brothers, Underworld, Orbital and The Orb. It was financially unsuccessful, he recalls, but still "sparked interest in people who thought EDM didn't exist anymore."

That same year he took Nocturnal Wonderland to a venue that would, in a few years' time, become the epicenter of American rock festivals — the Empire Polo Club in the Coachella Valley.

By 1997 artists like Moby and Prodigy were being billed as the Next Big Thing for a music industry looking to replace grunge. Raves from Rotella's Insomniac — as well as Go Ventures, B3 Cande and Fresh Produce — reached new heights by expanding to the National Orange Show fairgrounds in San Bernardino, the desert and the San Bernardino Mountains.

"I wasn't the only one doing raves anymore," Rotella says.

By the mid-aughts, electronic dance music wasn't just back, it was huge. Daft Punk's performance at Coachella in 2006 introduced a new generation of alt-minded hipsters to the edgier side of dance music, a side that would be reflected in the launch of the next year's HARD festival.

EDM fests were starting to take over the biggest venues the West Coast had to offer. Raving was now Bill Graham–level stadium rock.

That made Rotella a hot commodity.

He'd gotten his foot in the door almost a decade before at the Los Angeles Sports Arena. Both the arena and the L.A. Coliseum are essentially owned jointly by the city, county and state. The Coliseum — which hosted its last NFL game in 1994 — was eager to get in on its sister venue's action.

"The Sports Arena was making money," Rotella says, "so the guy who ran it was, like, 'Can you do more of these?' "

That guy was Coliseum events manager Todd DeStefano, he said. DeStefano was a well-paid football fan who came to the sister venues in 1998. He quickly saw raves' economic potential and worked closely with the promoters to make them happen, beginning in his first year on the job.

By 2005, DeStefano, realizing millions could be made, wanted to do the parties four times a year. He tapped Gerami, who muscled in on Rotella's longtime Fourth of July Electric Daisy Carnival weekend with an event of his own at the Coliseum, called Independance. It flopped.

So two years later, Rotella says, DeStefano invited him to bring EDC to the Coliseum instead. The party drew 29,000 people in 2007. By 2009 it was rocking 120,000. Raves now were bringing in 28 percent of the taxpayer-owned venues' revenue.

That following year, EDC at the Coliseum was the national rave champion, drawing 160,000 people over two days and featuring the cream of electronic dance music at the biggest DJ stage America had ever seen. Other festivals, including Ultra in Miami, Electric Zoo in New York, Movement in Detroit and Love Festival (renamed LovEvolution) also had gotten big, but Rotella's EDC was king.

Electric Daisy Carnival was so massive that Black Eyed Peas frontman will.i.am jokingly complained that he couldn't get a decent set time for his DJ performance in 2010. So massive that chaos broke out as ravers gate-crashed to get to a lower level. So massive that there were more than 60 arrests, mostly for drug-related allegations, and 200-plus "medical emergencies," officials said.

The idea of a government-owned venue hosting such huge parties, with all the attendant risk of drug abuse, was always awkward. More than a few ecstasy-overdose deaths have taken place following Insomniac and Go Ventures events over the years, including a 20-year-old who died after a rave at the Sports Arena in 2007.