Nocturnal Wonderland’s cancellation by no means indicated that Insomniac would take a break altogether. In Nocturnal’s absence, EDC would eclipse the event in 2002 – which would lead to it becoming the promotional company’s breadwinner as it is today. Furthermore, during the same year Rotella would channel his affinity for drum and bass into the launch of the Bassrush event series, even performing himself under the stage name Mindbender.
Over the years to follow, Rotella would form a handful of integral partnerships that would enable him to forge his own path towards becoming the leading purveyor of EDM events on the West Coast. Among them was L.A. Coliseum events manager Todd DeStafano, who saw raves as a hot commodity and began to work with Rotella in 2005. By 2007, EDC drew 29,000 attendees – and by 2009 the number increased to 120,000.
Curiously, even at this point in his career as a promoter, Rotella ran his operation humbly. Henry Villon, who got involved with Insomniac in 2009 after attending its events and has overseen its marketing teams since back when they were called street teams, speaks about the intimate nature of Insomniac Events during this stage. He worked his way up the ladder making a good impression on Insomniac higher-ups like Sal Marino and Joaquin Bamaca, eventually making Rotella’s acquaintance and observing his management style firsthand.
“[Nowadays] we have a huge office, but in the beginning it was his house,” Villon explains. “Like, 2009-2010, we would go to his house and pick up materials to promote…Pasquale’s house was the meetup point for all the materials and all the meetings we had about Insomniac.”
Rotella kept his sense of family at the core of Insomniac’s culture. His mother, “Mama” Irene Guadagno (who passed away in April of this year), famously cooked for everyone on the Insomniac team who visited Rotella’s house. Even in cases where members of the street teams had to flyer until 4:00 AM, she would invite them to have dinner at the house beforehand and send them off with leftovers.
“She was very hands on,” Villon says. “A lot of people don’t know [this] but she definitely played a big part in what Pasquale and what Insomniac is right now. She was very driven, and so obviously that goes with Pasquale – he was very driven to make these events bigger and better.”
2010 would mark perhaps the biggest landmark for Insomniac, as that year EDC would boast a higher attendance than any other U.S. electronic music festival. 160,000 people would travel to the Coliseum from all over the world to partake in the gathering – more than that of Ultra Music Festival, Movement Detroit or Electric Zoo. Around the same time, the dubstep breakthrough would thrust electronic music into the mainstream spotlight and kickstart a period of exponential growth for the EDM movement.
However, the 2010 edition of EDC would also mark the most infamous tragedy in the event series’ history. In addition to riots, 15-year-old Sasha Rodriguez slipped into a coma as a result of taking MDMA, and died in a hospital two days later. The heart of the controversy lay in the fact that during those years EDC was a 16-and-up event, but security had been lax enough to allow Rodriguez through the gates.
The situation spiraled further out of control when Rotella and Go Ventures founder Reza Gerami were indicted over allegations of corruption, bribery and embezzlement over side payments made to DeStafano over a number of years totalling $1.8 million – money suspected to have used to bribe DeStefano into looking the other way while the events held at the Coliseum grew more and more out of control. While the charges against Rotella and Gerami would eventually be dismissed, EDC would be forced to relocate to the Las Vegas Motor Speedway in Nevada where it still takes place to this day.
