ZO2 is more than a rock band. Its members have always given back, whether it was doubling as a kid’s band during the day or starting a foundation that helps kids around the world, ZO2 was always able to blow anyone away on stage and help kids off of it. After the tragic loss of bassist David Z seven years ago, guitarist/vocalist Paulie Z and drummer Joey Cassata have recruited bassist Sean McNabb and released a record showcasing the best of ZO2 along with a few new tracks. Paulie Z recently took some time to talk about the band and the new record Begin Again.
Please press the PLAY icon below for the MisplacedStraws Conversation with Paulie Z –
On what brought ZO2 back and finding Sean McNabb – Well, very, very simply put, it was one man who set the wheels in motion, and we’ll always give the credit to Mark Mendoza from Twisted Sister. He’s the one who started this all. So for better or for worse, if you’re upset that ZO2 is back and can send your hate mail to him, I think most people are probably happy.
He’s a friend and a colleague for a while. ZO2 has played with Twisted Sister. Many times back in the day, and we were just all kind of friendly from New York. He’s been super supportive of the David Z Foundation. Every fundraiser I’ve done, he always does either a video, a testimonial, or he’ll perform. He’s like, “Whatever you need, Paul, whatever you need”. He’s just a great guy. He mentioned to me just casually, literally, just off the cuff, it kind of threw me for a loop. He’s like, “I just want you to know how much of a fan I am of your band and really respect ZO2. I love the music”, he goes, “If you and Joey ever wanted to do a gig to raise money or just for a one-off whatever, I would be down to do it. I’d be happy to learn the songs and play with you”. I was like, “You would?” Now, first of all, you gotta understand, this is a legit rockstar that I grew up with. That’s like if Paul McCartney told him, “Hey, Mark, if there’s a Twister Sister reunion. I’ll play”. It was like, “Really?”
But never in a million years, I honestly didn’t think that, I would ever play ZO2 again, especially not a full set. I think I could see Joey and I doing a song or two. The idea of doing a full show with anyone other than David was just like, I can’t, I couldn’t even imagine it. But then I was like, “Well, but if it’s a benefit, if it’s for the foundation and it’s for a cause, and especially if it’s Mark, it’s not like just some guy we brought in as a replacement, this is more of a specialty. It’s a novelty because he’s a rock star.” I said, “That could be kind of interesting”. I asked Joe and he was like, “Yeah, that would be great”. He goes, “I’d love to play with Mark, even just to play with Mark”. So we said,” Okay, why don’t we do it for my birthday? When I do the jam, Ultimate Jam Night in March”, which happened to be the week or two, I think it was a week and a half before the pandemic. It was the last great event before the world shut down. We did it and it was awesome, and it was weird for me. Just in general, I think I had a lot of mixed emotions that night, people could even see it on my face that it was just, that I wasn’t all smiling as I usually am.
So I think it was just a very heavy night in general for multiple reasons. It was exciting to play the music again and to see you in the audience and all these other friends and fans from back in the day to play and sing that music. But then it was also like I look over and I’m not seeing who I wanna see there. So it was just very weird. But he, he’s the one who really led to it.
The main reason we wound up going with Sean and not continuing down that path was a few reasons. One, he is Mark Mendoza and Twisted Sister. He’ll always be Mark Mendoza. Kind of doing charity work for two knuckleheads from Brooklyn in that sense and number two, I think a big reason is that well, two big things. He doesn’t sing. The signature sound and branding of ZO2 is the three guys that sing and play, and he lives on the East Coast. I think one of the biggest challenges for doing that show, even though it was fun and everything, but we only had one rehearsal the night before. It’s very hard to get chemistry like that. Joey knows the material, so I don’t necessarily need to rehearse with Joey, but whoever is going to be the bass player and then sing, and then also sing harmony, we felt like we needed someone that was in LA local. What’s great about Sean is I’ve played with Sean many, many times at the Jam and we’re close. He sings. He plays. He lives like 10 minutes from my house, 15 minutes. So he came over a lot and I would go to him and we really had time to dig in and woodshed. He would ask me, “Oh, how do you want me to sing this “or whatever. I think that’s been the main difference as to why people are noticing that the chemistry is there because the work has been put in. It’s not like we just plug someone and you can’t just put Billy Sheehan in there just because he’s amazing. You can’t just put him and it’s like, “Oh yeah, there’s the chemistry.” It doesn’t work like that. It’s like when you see All-Star games, You put the All-Star basketball team and guys from different teams. It’s the best of the best. People don’t realize the magic comes from chemistry, and chemistry comes from mat time, as they say in wrestling, actually time in the room being together. So I think and that’s really the main thing. He’s got the look. He’s he’s a great player. He’s a great singer. Another big thing, he’s also very sensitive to the role he’s filling and he’s he’s doing it with so much grace. I just feel like he gets it. I think that there will be a lot of bass players that can come in and do the job, but may not do it with the same heart and soul that he is. So, there you go. That was the short answer, by the way.
On the new song “Begin Again” – Well, so ZO2 fans will know that it’s not technically a brand new song. It is a song, and” Live Today” also, which is on the collection, they were songs that we did back at the tail end of ZO2 and were going to be on whatever would have been another record if we did one. We did play it live a few times. So those two songs were kind of like the new direction. The reason they sound different, and I think the reason it speaks to a lot of people too, is because I personally was on this voyage of trying to become a little bit more, dare I say “commercial”. I really felt like the one thing we were missing was a song that was a radio hit, a crossover because musically we had the chops and the songs are great and everything, but like any band, you still need to cross over to the people that don’t understand what we’re doing. They don’t even care that we did that, that two measures in 7/8. They don’t care. They just want to be able to sing a song while they’re driving or in the mall. I felt like I wanted to see if we could even do that, and that’s why in that song and “Live Today”, you can hear that difference. They’re a little bit more radio-friendly. I’m not belting the whole song showing off my pipes. Most of the song is actually pretty mid-level and it was more also about lyrics. The lyrics weren’t about telling a story of some sort of rock and roll kind of cliche storyline. There was a real lyric.
“Begin Again” really was about me getting divorced originally, and me feeling that same sense of having to start over and then it just sat there. That was it. When we kind of took the hiatus and the reason hiatus is not we never actually broke up. It was just I got divorced. I was in a rough place. I moved to L.A. We didn’t really have anything going on. The industry was in the toilet. We’re like, “All right, well, let’s pause and do other things and then we can always come back”. Sadly, people didn’t know this, but actually, before David was killed, we had already had a plan of a return. We even had a date in New York. Sad. We had a whole plan of returning and we were talking about trying to do another TV show. So that was really extra sad in the sense that we already had decided, “Let’s do this again”. It never happened. But so what happened was when we decided to do this, I was like, “Well, let’s put out a song and let’s see if it resonates”.
I rewrote “Begin Again”. So, anyone who knows the original lyrics, you’ll see a lot of them are the same, but I rewrote it. To be more about now David and how and the band and feeling like what happens when getting divorced, anyone that has done it, is definitely a loss, it is definitely painful, but nothing compares to losing a loved one. Especially someone who’s like, you know how close we were. I mean, he wasn’t just some person. So, when I rewrote it and I showed Joey, I said, “What do you think?” Oh, I love him. We call each other. He’s like, “I love it. It’s perfect. It’s exactly where we are. It’s exactly what we’re trying to say”. and then and then Sean came in. I had a demo bassline in there and he put in his, his thing and it there it is. There’s the magic. There’s the chemistry. It’s, it’s exciting because I just never thought, it’s like when you fall in love again. I remarried. I always say my ex-wife was like winning a million-dollar lottery. And then my wife, Lucia is like a billion dollars. It’s like winning Powerball. You think you’ll never feel it again. It’s really exciting to feel that way again.
On if the songs are the original versions or remastered – Yeah, original studio version. We didn’t want to mess with them. First of all, we loved the mixes. It’s not like they were released in 1972, when the technology wasn’t (what it is now). Remastering wouldn’t even make a difference. They’re so well mixed and mastered. The only thing I did have to do was the” Z Rock Theme Song” and “Live Today”, I had to kind of go in and level them all out. So I kind of did a quasi-mastering. The Z Rock heme was really low in comparison. So I just evened things out a bit. And I think I did EQ that one just to match the rest of the tracks.
On book-ending the package with two new tracks – So that’s what we wanted. That’s exactly what we wanted, which is, and if anyone has the album, the album the CD if you look at the booklet. I don’t know if you were going to get to this or not, but the packaging is like a gallery. It tells our story almost like a little biography and it starts with the band now with Sean and how we started again, and it goes back to the beginning and goes through and that was exactly why the cover is the same way. I specifically worked with Gabriel Connor, who did an amazing job on this packaging, I told him what I wanted. We went back and forth back and forth. But I said, “I wanted to feel like our Susie”, the girl that we usually used, “is now she’s like moving on, retiring from (modeling)”, I didn’t want another pin-up. At first, we were going to do another pinup, then I told Joe, I was like, “I really think we need a transitional image that kind of acknowledges the pinups but gives us the opportunity to go in a different direction”. This is us now and that’s where that came from, that whole idea. So I’m glad you said that because it’s exactly what we wanted.
On what the future holds for ZO2 – A lot of eating. I see a lot of calories in our future. I can’t speak for anyone else, just for me, there’s no delusions of grandeur. That’s for sure. I don’t expect and I’m not even looking for it. If it happens, great. That’ll be a nice bonus. But Joey and I, when we said, “Are we going to do this?” We both kind of agreed this is not going to be our main thing again, like when we were in our 20s again, because both of us are fathers. He has two kids. I now have two kids. I have a baby girl, she’s 11 weeks old. It’s a whole nother world. I mean, look, I’m wearing, I’m wearing Polo for god’s sake, and I got cardigan sweaters. But you know what’s funny about it? When I was young, I used to think that rock and roll was about the way you looked and the way you dressed and the way you acted. I’ve learned that that’s all nonsense. Cause I’ll tell you right now, I can outrock anybody on stage. You put me up, I’ll outrock them in a second. I don’t care. I don’t care what I’m wearing. I don’t care how short my hair is. Put me on stage, I will outrock you any day. So I got past that whole idea of what a quote-unquote rock star looks like or acts like. That doesn’t faze me anymore. But I will say this, there is, there is a difference when you are a certain age or when you’re a parent, and also I’m a CEO of a nonprofit, obviously the foundation. I’m traveling all over the world doing music programs. I’m running a business. So I’m not going to go in a van. Joey and I and Sean, I’m sure we’re not going to get in a van and start touring and clubs and stuff like that. That’s not happening. So to answer your question, I think the idea is we kind of said we to do fun shows, either a show that financially pays well, we’ll do it. So if it makes sense financially, okay, we’ll do that. Or if it’s a fun show, like a festival or opening for a band, we like, even if then we don’t make money or we lose a little bit, but it’s fun and worth it. Then we’ll do that. So that’s the cool thing is there’s no pressure. We can just do this for fun. We know we have already a built-in fan base. It’s not huge, but it’s loyal and it’s great. We love our fans. I think what we would like to do for sure is put out new music because what’s great is we can put out music digitally. You don’t need the big labels like back in the day. We can put it out and if people like it, they like it. If they don’t, they don’t. But at least we can express ourselves musically. We’ll have some shirts online and we’ll have our social media and we can connect that way and we’ll see if something bigger happens, great. But if not, we’re happy with it just being fun and a passionate project.
On what Kiss meant to him growing up – KISS for me was everything. They’re still my favorite band and I always will love them. But I’ve kind of grown out of the fanaticism that I had. I will say that. Probably when I moved to LA and I sold my pinball machine, I stopped collecting. Maybe just whatever, a different lifestyle. I kind of got out of that fanaticism, but I still, they’re my favorite band and all that. But growing up, up until that point, it was more than just a favorite band. It really was borderline, dare I say, like a religion. It was part of my DNA. I saw people go to church and they had Jesus and I’m like, “Well, oh, you have Jesus, and I got Paul Stanley”. It was that important to me. I don’t know why or what it was. Whether it was the makeup, the music, or everything, but just was everything for me. There’s a lot of layers to it. I loved the visual, obviously. So that was, that helped me as an artist, as a visual artist who went to art school and stuff. So the visual caught my eye.
I love the music. A lot of people give them a hard time about it, which is fine. It’s apples and oranges. It’s a taste thing, but I love the music. I can close my eyes and just listen to the catalog and never see the makeup or whatever. I listen to Carnival of Souls, I listen, I like everything they did so musically I loved what they did. But I also think it was something about Paul and Gene, and I always was more Paul and Gene guy. I know people that are more Ace and Peter guys. We were raised very kind of wholesome, Dave and I never drank alcohol. I drink wine now and I like alcohol now, I’m starting to get into old fashions and Moscow mules, finally drinking some alcohol, but my whole life never drank any alcohol, or smoked one cigarette in my entire life. I have no tattoos. I’ve never been arrested. I don’t even have a cavity. Can you believe that? I mean, this is all, this is like how many people on the planet can say that? I don’t have a cavity. So, Dave and I were very wholesome. I think Joey in that way too. That’s why we clicked. We were just like kind of comic book, Dungeons & Dragons, action figure geeks, who happened to be, I think, musically pretty talented and funny. We had some skills that people enjoyed, but Kiss gave people like us some sort of hope. Because if you looked at Zeppelin, they were so cool and mystic and I was nothing, there was nothing cool or mystic about me or mysterious. Then you look at Aerosmith or the Stones and they’re smoking and drinking. The Beatles, I guess, were the closest things, but even the Beatles, the drugs, and even the Beatles were a little bit more for our age, a little bit too sophisticated. I didn’t understand the Beatles at that age, but I understood “Shout It Out Loud”. You know what I mean? I understood “Deuce” or “God of Thunder”, any of those songs, they were simple enough that at that age, I could kind of get into them. But then you see Paul and Gene talking about, “We don’t drink, we don’t smoke, and blah, blah, blah”, and they’re businesslike. There was an influence on me that I think shaped me as a person, not just as a music fan, it’s like how I lived my life. How dedicated they were to their craft, how they didn’t care what anybody else thought. That seeped into my personality that helped shape and empower me as a person.
That’s the power of music too That’s what people don’t realize. It’s not just sound. Music and art is a, dare I say like a spiritual thing, it’s a metal, physical element that there that people don’t realize anyway. That’s why if used properly, music is an incredible tool for other things. We see it as motivating when people have songs of protest, right? You can change the world with stuff like that. So that’s why I love it. Bringing in the foundation, for saying that’s why I love doing what I do with kids because I see the power and the impact And I get off on playing the rock, the guitar, and the Marshalls. I love that too. Don’t get me wrong. I love the rock star element of it. But there’s a whole nother side of it that a lot of people forget, which is that moving of the soul and that shaping. You can literally shape someone if they’re listening, depending on what they’re listening to. Make someone very insecure or can make someone very secure.
On the David Z Foundation – So it’s called the David Z Foundation obviously after David. It’s a non-profit official 501c3 non-profit in case people are wondering. So it’s not just like some local thing that we do. Everything is legit. While David was still alive, I had something called Rock Asylum Foundation back in 2011. I started it, and David helped me with that a lot. Basically, it was music programs for kids. Mostly we focus on underprivileged communities that don’t have music programs or can’t afford it. So when David was killed and during the pandemic, I had all this time, I had resurrected it because I had put it aside when I moved to LA and I was like getting my life back together and said, “Yeah, maybe one day”, I just figured one day, like, when I’m in my 60s. I just envision I’ll do the philanthropic stuff later. I don’t have time for that right now. But all of a sudden I had all this time during the pandemic, and it was fresh, David had just passed a couple of years before. So I said, “I really wanted to do this again”, and now I have more of a motivation. So I changed the name officially. Basically what we do is music programming with kids, specifically songwriting, we write songs with either, depending on which program we’re doing, either a group of kids, like a classroom or like a YMCA or a hospital, whatever, but a group of kids or an individual. Each one is slightly different in what we do, the idea is we go in and we write an original song with them about either an academic or social subject if it’s the group of kids, if it’s the individual kid, we’ll write about something personal. So that’s more of a youth mental health initiative. The other one is more of an academic or social initiative. But the cool thing is, we’re writing these songs with them. So they are actively writing these songs, original songs, and they go in, we record them in the studio professionally, and then we film them and make a music video at the most professional level that we can afford.
I don’t have a million-dollar Beyonce budget, but I don’t go in and do it like this is a kid’s song. I spent, if you had any idea how many hours and hours and hours I spent either editing or in the studio saying, “No, no, no, that’s a little, let’s change that” as if it was a Foo Fighters record that I was producing. That is the idea. The kids then get that empowerment of like, “Oh my God, I did that. That’s me in that video”. We love it because we’re doing what we love. We’re writing, we’re recording, we’re making music videos. I make sure the songs are all great because again, if it’s not great, then I can’t be proud of it.
So it’s like, I want it to be as good as if it was a ZO2 song, or like I said, if I was producing a real, professional signed label band. That’s what comes out. You get these songs and videos and it’s just like, wow, it’s hard to believe that they’re kids, but that’s, that’s what it is. We’re doing it all over the world. This year, we’ve won four awards, an Anthem award, two Telly awards. Even before this interview, I told you my shelf broke. All my awards fell down. But thankfully, they’re actually real awards. So they didn’t break in half. We just won ironically, a Davey award, a gold Davey award, and we’re finalists for two more Anthems right now. What’s cool about that is, it’s not to say, “Oh, look at all these awards”. It shows us that we’re on the right path and that there are people that acknowledge the work. That’s the great thing about awards. Even with the Grammys and Oscars and stuff. It’s just the recognition from other professionals that you did good work. That’s what means something to us and that’s what we’re doing. We’re doing a lot of these big benefit concerts. It’s just so much, so much stuff happening, I can’t sit still, I’m exploding with joy and ambition.
I will say the other thing is initially I knew it was going to be about him for the first few years and it was, but we knew very quickly we were going to have to, it has to get past it being about David. It’ll always be. He’s always the root and the inspiration. Obviously, David Z Foundation, everyone will know that he was the reason we’re doing this. But now we’re at the point where we’re transitioning into the point where it’s beyond that. Because the people in Africa don’t know who ZO2 is and the kids in Malaysia, they have no idea who David was or who I am or ZO2 or rock and roll even, they don’t even listen to this kind of stuff and they’re the ones we won awards from those videos and those kids are going crazy. Now it’s about the kids. It’s about the work. That’s a very exciting thing too, because I knew there’s only so long I can really kind of just keep pulling from that source of like, “Oh, this is for our beloved David”, because, look, everyone’s going to, we all die eventually. We’re all going to go, and time at a certain point, there’s that time factor where people are going to be like, “Okay, but that was like 20 years ago”. I’m not an idiot. People who knew him a lot, like you guys will feel it every year because you were his friend, but there’s only so much I can keep going to like my neighbors and my family, I go to everybody. There’s a certain point where it has to be beyond that. And I feel now we’ve started to get past that, we got to that point when now it’s really the work is speaking for itself and starting to get celebrity support, Corey Glover from Living Colour was in one of our videos, and that’s exciting too.
On his plans for 2024 – Well, I just told you we just had a baby. So I got now two kids and I have Bohemian Queen, a Queen band. I have Zep-LA, which is our Zeppelin tribute. I have Purplish, which is a new Deep Purple tribute and we’re playing Detroit next week. So it’s exciting, our first official show. We’re starting a Journey tribute band next year. So that’s four. I have a Chris Cornell tribute band and I have an, I don’t want to say a tribute, but I have an Alice in Chains project. I do like a full Alice in Chains show. So that’s another thing that I have. So that’s as far as bands and then ZO2 and then my solo stuff. I’m doing a lot of recording and writing of my own material more so for licensing to try to get stuff in movies and TV and things like that again, not to tour, but like, as a songwriter. Then I got the kids stuff. I still teach preschool twice a week. I’m my son’s music teacher at his preschool. I do tons of private lessons. I’m writing. I still have a lot of kids music that I’m writing and recording and we’ll probably put out something soon. And I’ve got the foundation. And then my voice lesson, my covers, I’ve been doing a lot of vocal covers to lead up to a vocal program and I’m getting just so many new students from these vocal YouTube covers. Because I’ve been just pushing social media hard. I brought in a guy named Luis Kalia, who’s great. He’s doing my social media and he’s just killing it. I got a viral video of…a cover of “Faithfully” is at 1.8 million views on TikTok. I was like, “yes”, at least I got one for now. I just got recently voted president of the HOA of my complex. So just if everything I told you wasn’t enough now, and I’m like, “Oh my God”.
