David Ensminger and Bill Sassenberger are a couple of old punks – literally.

Both men have done their time in the punk music scene. Ensminger’s love of punk goes back to his younger years in Rockford, Ill., when his older brother introduced him to punk when he was 10. Ensminger would eventually become a punk historian, as his early days of collecting flyers for hometown shows led to him moving to Houston and writing such books as Left of the Dial: Conversations with Punk Icons and Punk Women: 40 Years of Women Who Built Punk Rock.

As for Sassenberger (also from Illinois), he and his late wife, musician Julianna Towns, ran Toxic Shock Records, first in Pomona, Calif., then in Tucson, Ariz. From 1983 to 1998, the underground punk label/record store dropped tunes from such artists as Corrosion of Conformity, The Hickoids, The Zero Boys, and Italian rockers Raw Power.

This Saturday, Ensminger and Sassenberger will get together to tell their punk tales at Cactus Music, this Saturday afternoon at 1 pm. Ensminger approached Sassenberger about doing this public convo, since both men currently have books out. “I know that he had been doing a book tour, on-and-off,” says Ensminger, who will turn 53 in November. “So, I reached out to him and, then, reached out to [owner Quinn Bishop] at Cactus and we just sorta triangulated and kinda made it happen.”

Sassenberger, who’ll be making some Gulf Coast stops via train this weekend (he’s calling it his “Southern Discomfort Whistlestop Tour”), welcomed the invitation. “He just mentioned, ‘Hey, why don’t you come over to Houston,’” says Sassenberger, 69. “I said, ‘OK, lemme check the train schedule and see if we can make it work.’

Earlier this year, Sassenberger released Toxic Shock Records: Assassin of Mediocrity, A Story of Love, Loss and Loud Music. This memoir is not just a chronicle of the label and Sassenberger’s years of hanging with punk legends. It’s also a diary of Sassenberger’s last years with Towns, who had a stroke in 2010 and spent most of the following decade bouncing from hospitals to rehab before passing away in 2019.

“It has a dual narrative,” says Sassenberger. ”My wife was very much a huge part of what I did with Toxic Shock. We were partners in that. So, I think it was important to have her life documented along with my endeavors and whatnot. We were both behind-the-scenes in a lot of ways, but it was an important part of the journey to let people know what she was going through.”

Ensminger, who gave the book a rave review on his Facebook page, knows all too well about saluting punk music and beloved punk figures who have moved on to that big mosh pit in the sky. Ensminger has recently released the second edition of Austin Punk Invasion: A Collection of Interviews, Art, and Reflections. When the book first dropped in 2018, it was at a slim 86 pages. Considering how several artists have passed away since then, Ensminger felt it was time for an update.

“It was a thin, little volume and, then, we did a big expansion because a couple of the fellas died recently, like Gary Floyd of The Dicks and Sister Double Happiness and Tom [Huckabee] from The Huns,” he said. “So, we wanted to pay tribute to them. We went back in and did a redesign. We added a lot more visual history — a ton more photographs, flyers, ephemera — than before.”

With both Ensminger and Sassenberger going from gadflies to historians, often going from town-to-town to reminisce about their years in the underground punk world, they usually meet fellow punkers from those crazy years, sometimes in the unlikeliest places. Last month, Ensminger did a lecture on punk at Southern Louisiana University and, afterwards, talked to a couple people who saw a lot of Austin punk shows.

“To me, that’s really rewarding,” Ensminger says. “Rather than roll into a big urban space, where people are sorta indifferent and too cool for school or sorta jaded, I love to go to these smaller places where they’re, like, eager to meet and eager to talk and eager to touch base.”

Sassenberger adds that it’s been fun getting to meet people who used to buy his Toxic Shock releases through the mail. “For us, Toxic Shock was really dependent on — our bread-and-butter was the mail-order catalog,” Sassenberger says. “We would mail it annually and we’d connect the music scene that was happening to all these different, smaller places. The customers we got — when you meet them today, it’s really rewarding. [They say] ‘Hey, I got your catalog back in ‘83 and I was in this little town where everybody hated me, and you changed my life. You gave me some hope in all of this.’ So, that stuff has really been rewarding.”

With their respective tomes now out on bookshelves and online stores, Ensminger and Sassenberger have fully embraced their roles as archivists of underground punk. “We wanted to bring as much as possible and concentrate it in a book that’s affordable — you know, it’s a $14 book — and that young people and old people alike can share in that shared, cultural, visual history that was so important to punk,” Ensminger says.

“We’re all getting a bit older and I wanted to get my story down on paper before I forget all the details,” Sassenberger says, “before it was too late.”