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Jordan Rothstein stood wide-eyed as he walked up the stairs into Electric Daisy Festival, which welcomed more than 130,000 attendees and 50 of the world’s top DJs Friday night for the popular annual music festival at the Las Vegas Motor Speedway.
The 21-year-old Stockton, Calif., resident, who sported a tie-dye muscle shirt from a local marijuana dispensary, attended the festival for the first time. Needless to say, he was impressed.
“All I can say is this is unreal,” Rothstein said. “My God.”
Eight music stages of thumping dance, electronic, house and rap music filled the air for the eighth Las Vegas edition of the event. EDC was moved to May this year from its regular weekend in mid-June.
Also new this year, Camp EDC added dozens of air-conditioned tents and motor homes for estimated thousands of festival-goers to spend their nights this weekend, with amenities like a mega-pool, soccer field and Zen garden for down time between the nightly DJ performances inside the speedway.
Locals and tourists alike danced the night away, wearing costumes ranging from unicorns and fairies to Pokemon characters and gladiators. Some dressed in as little as legally allowed to party and beat the heat.
Holding a totem with a cut-out picture of Brazilian soccer star Neymar, Larissa Nascimento, 29, of Curitiba, Brazil, said that she attended the festival as part of a weeklong vacation in Las Vegas to see popular DJs Kygo and Diplo.
“There are so many chances to see one famous DJ here and there, but you never really get to see them all together,” Nascimento said in Portuguese. “It’s a special event.”
Locals Juan Muñoz, 22, and Liliana Castro 23, compared Friday’s opening EDC night to popular California-based festival Coachella.
Wearing a modest neon green-colored top with fishnet bottoms, Castro waved a human-sized inflatable toothbrush while the couple waited for Mike Will Made-It, to perform. She said the prop had helped them make “plenty of friends.”
“I feel like if your totems are weird, it’s a good thing,” Castro said. “More people want to talk with you.”
With nighttime temperatures forecasted in the 70s on both Saturday and Sunday, the weather should be “significantly more bearable” than typical June nighttime highs in the 80s and 90s, said National Weather Service Meteorologist Andy Gorelow.
Contrary to previous years, drivers traveling to the event on Friday did not face overwhelmingly long traffic delays, according to the Nevada Highway Patrol. Delays of about 20 minutes were reported northbound on Las Vegas Boulevard from Cheyenne Road as late as 11 p.m.