Aug 7, 2026 · 1 hr 15 min · 25 segments
Dave Preno is the guitarist of **THE VIRUS**, a legendary Pennsylvania street punk band. In this interview, he gets into his own history of discovering and playing punk, the formation of his band, the…
Dave PrenoGuestDanHostseen-[punk rock music] So I kind of just said all this, but I'm gonna say it again.
Punk means a lot of things to a lot of different people, to everyone probably.
You say the word punk, some people might say, "Hey, that's an insult." Other people might say, "Hey, that's pretty cool." If you think about music, they think about Green Day, or they think about The Ramones, or the Sex Pistols, My Chemical Romance, Television, or The Casualties.
And the thing about all that is nobody's wrong.
The word punk stands for what feels like an endless list of things.
And I'm not sure what it first meant to me when I was a kid and first heard the word punk.
It was probably some sort of insult.
It was probably used by that nasty bitch Shredder against my friends the Teenage Mutant Ninja Turtles.
But at some point I must have realized it was music.
What music did I make that realization with, I can't recall.
I did have a rebellious neighbor who was a couple years younger than me and quite an influence, some might say in a bad way.
He was a bad kid.
We actually had a few of those in my neighborhood now that I think about, the ones that had to go to the separate school for bad kids.
It was like a whole different level of short bus.
They, and they literally had a short bus that would come to our neighborhood and pick these bad kids up to their prison school, wherever it was.
Manitou it was called, like a Guantanamo for teenagers.
Anyway, this one neighbor, he was into cool things, at least now things that I think are cool, and things that looked cool to me back then.
He might come down to the bus stop smoking a cigarette.
He didn't care.
It was like right outside of his house, too.
The guy had balls.
He also had a ton of CDs.
I used to go into his room with his little brother.
I was kind of infatuated with this guy.
He rode a skateboard.
seen-[punk rock music] So I kind of just said all this, but I'm gonna say it again.
Punk means a lot of things to a lot of different people, to everyone probably.
You say the word punk, some people might say, "Hey, that's an insult." Other people might say, "Hey, that's pretty cool." If you think about music, they think about Green Day, or they think about The Ramones, or the Sex Pistols, My Chemical Romance, Television, or The Casualties.
And the thing about all that is nobody's wrong.
The word punk stands for what feels like an endless list of things.
And I'm not sure what it first meant to me when I was a kid and first heard the word punk.
It was probably some sort of insult.
It was probably used by that nasty bitch Shredder against my friends the Teenage Mutant Ninja Turtles.
But at some point I must have realized it was music.
What music did I make that realization with, I can't recall.
I did have a rebellious neighbor who was a couple years younger than me and quite an influence, some might say in a bad way.
He was a bad kid.
We actually had a few of those in my neighborhood now that I think about, the ones that had to go to the separate school for bad kids.
It was like a whole different level of short bus.
They, and they literally had a short bus that would come to our neighborhood and pick these bad kids up to their prison school, wherever it was.
Manitou it was called, like a Guantanamo for teenagers.
Anyway, this one neighbor, he was into cool things, at least now things that I think are cool, and things that looked cool to me back then.
He might come down to the bus stop smoking a cigarette.
He didn't care.
It was like right outside of his house, too.
The guy had balls.
He also had a ton of CDs.
I used to go into his room with his little brother.
I was kind of infatuated with this guy.
He rode a skateboard.
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