The scene at Electric Daisy Carnival: Wasn’t this place supposed to be a speedway?

By John Katsilometes

Saturday, June 9, 2012 | 4:41 p.m.

It was sometime after I was nearly rammed by a girl riding a bicycle tricked out as a wheeled housefly, and before I encountered a guy dressed as a disco teddy bear, that I thought of the late Ralph Engelstad — one of our city’s mythic figures.

He passed away a decade ago of lung cancer, but not before building a lasting legacy in Las Vegas and across the country. Engelstad was the maverick, multimillionaire owner of Imperial Palace, a man of ample mystique who donated several million dollars to help fund two sports arenas bearing his name at the University of North Dakota in Grand Forks (his alma mater) and in Thief River Falls, Minn. His Engelstad Family Foundation has given several millions to charitable causes in Las Vegas, particularly Opportunity Village and UNLV.

If such acts can be accomplished quietly, the Engelstad family has achieved that, remaining as private as its patriarch.

The charitable work of Engelstad and his family far outweighs the controversy surrounding the notoriously private magnate, who was hardly ever interviewed for any reason in Las Vegas. He collected Nazi artifacts, and was once fined $1.5 million by the Nevada Gaming Commission for holding parties in the late-1980s coinciding with Adolf Hitler’s birthday for employees in his secret Nazi memorabilia room (he later apologized for what he deemed a lapse in judgment and emptied the room of the controversial keepsakes). The “Nazi Parties” have been an oft-discussed piece of Vegas lore ever since.

Most notably, for the purposes of what is unfolding in Las Vegas this weekend, Engelstad was one of the visionaries and original co-owner of the sprawling motorsports fortress Las Vegas Motor Speedway. That is where Electric Daisy Carnival, a happy festival of wild staging and thunderous electronic sound, is being held through Sunday night.

What Engelstad would think of this joyously mad use of his motorsports facility, a place where IndyCar racing events are on hold but electronic music is eagerly embraced, is anyone’s guess. It certainly was not something accounted for in the speedway’s original blueprint.

More than 100,000 celebrants per night are wading into the LVMS superspeedway complex. That it is actually a functioning speedway is only remotely apparent, with the massive stages, full-scale carnival and masses of young people dressed in various stages of rave wear, using the facility as a playground. The infield is full while the bleachers sit empty.

The speedway, originally, was not built to be this type of event. Not in the September 1996, when the track opened with an Indy Racing League event won by Richie Hearn. Engelstad and his deputy in the project, energetic antique car aficionado and racing figure Richie Clyne, joined with Vegas resort mogul Bill Bennett (who owned the Sahara at the time) to realize a multitrack facility where the greatest racers of any variety would compete.

The idea was to celebrate Andretti, not Aoki.

But over the years, long after the original ownership group sold the track to Bruton Smith, LVMS execs have expanded the use of the LVMS superspeedway. It seems senseless to let that enormous venue sit idle when music festivals with the capacity to bring $136 million to Las Vegas need a place to play. EDC debuted at LVMS last summer, and all that the electronic-music festival shares with the races held on the 1.5-mile tri-oval is high volume and a splash of color.

A traipse around the facility is to understand that EDC is a multileveled entertainment experience. It is where Pure nightclub crashes with the Western Idaho State Fair on Halloween night. Moments after you pass the trailer serving corn dogs and “cheese on a stick,” you are met by the flaming octopus artifice "El Pulpo Mechanico," borrowed from the annual Burning Man music festival.

The scope and size is greater than any music festival produced in Vegas, by far. The main stage allows for 55,000 fans, and I am reminded that figure is about the combined seating capacity of Sam Boyd Stadium and the Thomas & Mack Center.

And that is just a single stage. I walked the grounds at the U2 show at Sam Boyd in October 2009, with the enormous claw stage and its interlocking panels set in the middle of the football field. That stage would have fit in ideally, but not dominated, the scene at EDC.

As I made my way across the complex, I happened upon a wheeled, white snake and strolling performers dressed as stilted honeybees. It is a happy scene, relentlessly so. I was talking to a guy dressed in a long green shorts and a sleeveless, psychedelic vest who was the apparent captain a cluster of partiers, a group of eight staying in two rooms at LVH.

“Where are you from?” I asked.

“Wait!” he answered, and spun off to dance with his friends. Off they went, a uniformed and fuzzy-footed conga line, heading in the general direction of the main stage.

Austin De la Torres and his girlfriend, Shanna McChesney, did hold still long enough to chat with the uninitiated. They live in Salt Lake City and are booked at Excalibur this weekend. They plan to check back into their room at around 5 a.m. each morning.

“We were here last year and loved it,” De la Torres said. “It’s awesome, oh yeah.”

I asked if it is true that the music is largely incidental to the raving party spilling across the speedway.

“Yeah, yeah,” he said. “You could say that.” McChesney wore a heavily beaded, biking-top-and-skirt ensemble with sheen, arm-length sleeves.

“It took me two weeks to make it,” she said.

I hit the Spire of Fire tower, where anyone can climb into a two-person station and press four knobs that fire up ascending levels of flame.

“You’re into this!” said the hostess of the flaming art piece, Haley Capri of Lake Tahoe.

“I want one of these at my house!” I called out while watching my pyrotechnic dance show explode as I pressed the lighted buttons.

The guy dressed as a teddy bear was something of an enigma. He posed for photos, dressed like an adult-size, illuminated Teddy Ruxpin. He said it took months to fashion the costume, made of fake fur, lighted trim and a Fiberglas head.

He was joined by a guy who seemed like his appointed sidekick, agent or publicist.

“Can I get your name?” I asked as the guy, somewhat unnervingly, pulled off his head.

“I’d rather not,” he said.

His buddy said, “Just call him Teddy Bear Guy.”

Teddy Bear Guy. A guy who is, maybe, in the Witness Protection Program.

On the way out I walked across the grassy infield facing the main grandstand. This is usually where winners of NASCAR events spin out in smoky celebration, the checkered flag waving from the car. But Friday night the area was bright with towering, illuminated art pieces, including a cluster of glowing daisies.

What would Ralph think? You have to laugh. Maybe he’d appreciate what has become of his dream facility. Probably, he’d want to know more about Teddy Bear Guy.

Follow John Katsilometes on Twitter at Twitter.com/JohnnyKats. Also, follow “Kats With the Dish” at Twitter.com/KatsWithTheDish.