Around 3pm on June 1, 1992, the KABC news-chopper pilot took a call on his radio. “There appears to be some kind of stunt going on over at the Hollywood sign…”
Banking over the city, he flew north and sure enough, as his cameraman recorded, a 20-foot high crucifix had been attached to the letter ‘Y’ and perched – if not exactly nailed – on it was a shirtless long-haired man whose belt buckle spelt out the name ‘Jizzo’.
The performance art stunt had been dreamed up by ‘Jizzo’ – singer Jizzy Pearl (not his real name, either) and his Love/Hate bandmates years before being signed by Columbia as a statement about what it took to make it in Hollywood. But with the label soon to drop the band after just two albums, it served perfectly well as a reminder of their current plight.
Article continues belowAnd so it was that Pearl found himself in the wash of rotor blades, waiting to be arrested but staring down at a 60-foot drop above a cliff of the Hollywood Hills, fearing he might leave the scene in an ambulance rather than an LAPD squad car.
It was bassist/songwriter/artist/pothead Skid’s fault. The stunt was being filmed for the final scene in a never-released Love/Hate movie. “I was willing to do anything to get my career back on track, even at the risk of my own hide,” Pearl wrote in his online history of Love/Hate. “I thought maybe this little demonstration would make a difference. So Skid went about building the cross. It was fucking huge…”
So huge it had to be smuggled onto the site in pieces, then assembled and erected under the cover of darkness. Behind the scaffold supporting the ‘Y’, Skid and drummer Joey Gold helped Jizzy up on a chain ladder then left him alone. No need for them all to go to jail to make the point.
“I was really holding onto that cross for dear life,” says Pearl. “It wasn’t constructed with safety in mind. After the first hour or so it was getting surreal. I was so high off the ground that I couldn’t get off the cross even if I wanted to.”
When the police finally arrived, they laughed and called out a fire crew to get him down, then arrested him for trespassing and slapped on the cuffs. Down at the station, a police psychiatrist asked the singer why he’d done it. Jizzy deadpanned: “I’m making a plea to the Rock Gods.”
The stunt got the band publicity they sought on the day, but Columbia Records were not amused and withdrew support for Love/Hate’s planned tour with Black Sabbath. They dropped the band shortly after.
"I look back on it and simply marvel that I didn’t plummet to my death," Jizzy told Classic Rock in 2016. "It was a dumb, reckless thing to do but it got people talking about the band."
Two years later, Jizzy used the original KABC footage as the introduction for his appropriately titled solo single, You're Gonna Mis Me When I'm Gone.
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