Welcome back to Milwaukee Metal Monthly, the column where I talk to people who hear Judas Priest on the radio and exclaim, “Turn that up!”
This month’s installment includes interviews with three DJs—Jason Ellis, Edgar Vargas, and Russ Clark—from 91.7 WMSE. They’re the hosts of the station’s two metal shows: Ellis and Vargas host Into Battle, which airs Wednesday nights from 9 p.m. to midnight; and Clark hosts Friday Morning Shrapnel, which airs Friday (very early) mornings from midnight to 3 a.m.
Before we dive in, lemme get a coupl’a full disclosure items outta the way. First: I’ve been a volunteer for WMSE since October 2022—I come in once per week to help organize their physical media library—but I hadn’t met any of the DJs interviewed for this piece prior to our conversations. Second: I originally planned on doing these interviews for the February installment. Sid McCain, whom I know personally, suggested I wait until March’s issue to coincide with the station’s 45th anniversary.
With housekeeping done, let’s jump in with Into Battle and its primary host, Ellis. I s’pose it’s best to start with some quick background. The show’s current name is taken from the Brocas Helm song. (“Sometimes [the name] sucks to say with the state of the current world right now,” admits Ellis.) Originally the show was called Team Metal, and it was hosted by two of Ellis’ friends. Then Ellis joined, and, over time, essentially inherited the show from them. A name change followed because Ellis wanted something better. At any rate, he’s been doing Into Battle for long enough to be a seasoned veteran. “I think 2009 was my first year, so [it’s been] 16 or 17 years. It’s been a while. I remember doing a six-hour show on New Years Eve 2009 into 2010. I did a decade in review. That was where I was at that point, because I was like, ‘Let’s really drive this needle home. Let’s make this as big as possible. We’ll cover all elements.’”
When speaking with Ellis, two things become apparent pretty much immediately: he’s the loquacious type who uses “oeuvre” in casual conversation, and he’s capital-O Opinionated. (Quick example: “I’ve had people challenge that I’m into metal ’cause I’m a vegan. I’ve been a vegan for 20-odd years, and it’s like, ‘Come look at my record collection, homie. You’re gonna challenge this?’ Like, c’mon.”) He’s also entertaining, empathetic, and effortlessly quotable. Oh, and he’s exceptionally generous with his time—i.e., he talked to me for 55 minutes during a workday.
Naturally, we were able to cover a lotta ground, including the fact that heavy metal kept Ellis company growing up. “I grew up in a pretty small, conservative town north of here called Port Washington—not popular—and a lotta times the only friend I had was the records and CDs that I liked,” he says. “That was the world I would turn to because that was the thing—‘This makes sense to me.’” And Ellis’ father had a(n important) hand in his introduction to the genre. “[My dad] was the one that turned me onto Queensrÿche. Queensrÿche is, by far, my favorite band of all time. [Metal] was just in my household growing up. I grew up hearing Judas Priest and Iron Maiden and Saxon, and things like that, since I was a child.”
For Ellis, that sense of discovery is a primary motivation for doing Into Battle. “I’m still discovering all that sort of stuff,” he says. “It’s a big part of why I like doing this week in, week out. There’s definitely things I listen to more—I listen to Queensrÿche and Tori Amos more than anything else—but I do like that there’s new stuff out there.” A bit later, he expands on this. “I wanna keep [the show] where it’s still relevant. We’re using it as a way to get ourselves involved in the live-music element. I know that logistics don’t really matter, but people notice there’s a lot of interest in this band by context points like Instagram interaction or buying stuff off Bandcamp. When people are on tour and see they have a good stronghold [in a given city], people use those optics. So, it’s something where you want to help.”
As important as the metal scene is to Ellis, he’s just as quick to concede how absurd it all is. “I can look at the music and see how silly and goofy [it is],” he says. “Like, I love Manowar, but I also don’t think that Manowar could win a fight against, like, Bone Thugs. I think Bone Thugs would beat the shit outta Manowar.” When I mention that there’s a lotta crossover between metal fans, fantasy fans, and wrestling fans because of the pageantry, Ellis quickly agrees. “Yeah, that’s the best part—the over-the-top theatrics, the silliness. I don’t think [Ronnie James] Dio walked around with a sword. But when Dio brought out a sword on stage, I was like, ‘Fuck yeah, that rules.’ That’s what I wanna see out of this weird little man. If I go into Half Price Books and Dio’s walking around with a sword, I’m gonna be like, ‘Weirdo.’ But when he’s doing it [on stage] and I paid 40 dollars—bam! It’s there, it makes sense to me.”
So, of course, it comes as no surprise that Ellis is (self-)aware enough to be selective when it comes to what he does and does not play on Into Battle. For example, he doesn’t care for “stuff that uses bravado to push the envelope” and won’t play bands that “use their position to be right-wing and aggressive in that way [to] promote racism.” And just in case ya might think those principles go out the window for his own taste, he’ll even chuck out a band or album that he once enjoyed. “Even if I like this record, and it turns out they’re kinda goon-y or have hyper-right-wing views—basically, they’re bigots—I’d never listen to that record again,” he proclaims. “I don’t find room for that.”
Ellis also doesn’t have much patience for metal as team sports. When I inquire about whether or not Black Sabbath shoulda changed their name after Ozzy was fired and replaced with Dio, Ellis dismisses the idea. “I feel like no one woulda cared,” he argues. “Black Sabbath is a marketable thing. I think everybody has this idealized loyalty to things. Or there’s the whole thing where Power Trip is gonna tour without Riley [Gale, former vocalist who passed away in 2020], and there’s people upset about that. It’s like, ‘Why, man?’ The guys who wrote these songs want to pay tribute to this person’s life. And I’m assuming they didn’t go, ‘Hey, who’s the guy Riley hated the most? Let’s get him to be in the band.’ They didn’t do that. They found somebody who was also homies with all them, and they feel like this person would do well.”
Yet, the small stuff doesn’t in any way detract from Ellis’ devotion to metal. “I love this music,” he declares. “I love all the stuff about it. It means a lot to me. This has given me so much, and that’s why I wanna try to find a way to give back.” He’s just as glad that WMSE provides Milwaukee multiple metal shows and hosts. “It feels better now that we have Russ and Edgar in the mix, because now we have a variety of voices. We have a variety of options. If you don’t like what I’m doing but you like heavy music, you’re not clicking the station off now. It gives you an alternative [to me].”
One of those alternatives is Into Battle’s other host, Edgar Vargas, who usually does the show on the third Wednesday of the month. Compared to Ellis, Vargas is more reserved in temperament. He’s got a humble, aw-shucks vibe, and, without irony, uses “gosh” several times during our 40-minute conversation at Hawthorne Coffee Roasters. That’s not to say he doesn’t have any opinions or is unwilling to share them, though. For example, here he is talking about a Chicago band called Immortal Bird: “They’re one of my favorite bands right now because they’re not necessarily black metal, they’re not necessarily grindcore or death metal, but they just make it work. It’s wild.”
Where Vargas is similar to Ellis is that the former’s gateway into metal was old-school stuff, too. “It’s a little tacky, but it all starts with Sabbath, ya know,” he says with a chuckle. “There was just a certain point where my brother and I grew up listening to a lot of ’90s hip-hop, but then we started listening to Zeppelin and all the older bands. And then we were introduced to Sabbath, and then from there we just started listening to Maiden, Judas Priest. And then I started getting more interested in stuff like Kreator, Sepultura—all the heavier and faster bands. From there, I started getting more into death metal and black metal. But I’d say it all starts with Sabbath for sure.”
Vargas joined Into Battle in early 2025, following some practice sessions towards the end of 2024. To hear him tell it, he and Ellis hit it off immediately after bonding over—you guessed it—heavy metal. “I brought stuff into Jason’s show, and Jason right away was like, ‘Oh, Spectral Voice. I know these guys. Oh, and there’s Morbid Angel and Cryptopsy,’” he recalls. “He recognized all these albums, and the same night he was like, ‘If it all works out, you can co-host the show with me.’ And I was like, ‘Whoa, alright.’ So it happened almost instantaneously. I was so stoked about it. At first, as I was still training—like, going through the training process—I was asked to sub-in randomly throughout January and February, and then I think March was when it was quote-unquote ‘official’ where I was the co-host of the show.”
Since then, Vargas’ has used his platform to share the music he loves. “I just wanted an outlet to play the stuff that I grew up listening to and the stuff I’m into now,” he says. “I always get so excited and so eager to share this miserable and horrific music. It’s just great to have that outlet—sharing new music and sharing bands that I’m obsessed with, and wanting other people to share that obsession with me. If anything, just being able to play this crazy music is what keeps me going for sure.”
Interestingly, Vargas’ taste in music is at least partially rooted in boundary-pushing, and some of the bands he uses to illustrate that point might be, let’s say, unexpected for a metalhead. “I will say I have a tendency to gravitate towards bands that are working towards a bigger sound, like Can and how they’re getting into krautrock,” he says. “They’re trying to really build up that krautrock sound. Or My Bloody Valentine and what they were trying to do with Loveless and Isn’t Anything. Even Detroit techno, too, and ’90s house music. That’s always something I have been very fond of—people just trying to elevate a sound and build it up.” He then adds with a shrug, “But for whatever reason, metal just scratches something for me a bit more than other genres have.”
Interestingly, what makes Vargas’ Into Battle different from Ellis’ is that Vargas uses his time as a radio host to get a little cartoonish and have a little fun with the show. Indeed, beneath his soft-spoken exterior lies a vivid imagination. One of Into Battle’s former recurring characters, for example, was his twin brother “Javier” who’d sneak in when Vargas wasn’t looking and play incongruous music. “Honestly, it’s just me trying to have as much fun as I can with the show,” he laughs. “So there was this thing that I was doing—I should bring it back—I was starting my show with late-90s/early 2000s pop music. There was a day where I played Sugar Ray at the start of the show. I played Britney Spears at the start of a show. I played an Usher song at the beginning.”
If you’re wondering what Vargas’ motivation might be for tossing in some Monty Python-esque absurdity, the answer is two-fold. Half of the answer is self-amusement. “I was just trying to think ‘What could I do to build this little world that I’m entertaining myself with?,’” he explains. “At the end of the day, it’s just for my own indulgences. I have this platform, so I might as well just [do it]. And I haven’t gotten any calls about it. No one’s told me to stop doing that. So I’m just gonna keep doing it ’cause it’s fun for me.” The other half is quasi-logistical. The show’s characters—including imps and goblins—who visit the studio (a.k.a. “the crypts”) function as a way to add some rationality and organization to a show that features such a wide birth of metal genres. “I introduced these characters during my Thanksgiving [2025] show to try to have, I dunno, a way to incorporate different genres into the show. Whenever I do the show, I try to keep it organized, but it’s a whirlwind of different genres.”
And that whirlwind makes for a hefty homework assignment when looking into band’s and/or band members’ past. “I try to research and source and track the band’s history and whether the members have been doing sketchy stuff,” says Vargas. “Pretty much my number one rule is no Nazis. If they have really questionable or sketchy things they’ve done, I make it a point to not play those bands. There’s been times where I mistakenly play a band and half way through I realize, ‘Fuck,’ and then I stop the song and I just move onto whatever else I had planned. And to that point, too, I do try to highlight bands and labels that very much emphasize playing stuff that isn’t [National Socialist black metal]. I’ve been slowly adding stuff to the metal catalog and I’ve been trying to reach out to labels and PR people, which is a whole other world.”
But, overall, Vargas is just happy to be a part of Into Battle, and the metal scene as a whole, and he’ll tell ya that with infectious enthusiasm. “I’m really enjoying doing what I’m doing,” he says. “It’s just great to have this outlet not just to have my silly, lighthearted moments, but being able to play music from a band called Meth Drinker that plays some of the best sludge metal I’ve ever heard in my life. It’s only been a year, but it’s nice to be involved in that world a lot more, too. It’s great. It’s been a blast for sure.”
Speaking of blasts, let’s now discuss Friday Morning Shrapnel, hosted by the easygoing Russ Clark. Shrapnel is the younger brother to Into Battle, having only existed for a coupl’a years. When I ask Clark whether or not the end of 2022 is about right for the show’s starting point, Clark more or less confirms that via surrounding events. “I can tell you why the show started, and that can probably date it,” he says. “Sid McCain was talkin’ to me about [Milwaukee] Metal Fest coming back [in May 2023], and I basically said to her, ‘I don’t care what it is, but I wanna be a part of it. Let me dump the trash, whatever.’ The next day, she emailed me and said, ‘Hey I need a DJ.’ I’m like, ‘Oh. No, I don’t know how to do that.’ I went home and thought about it, and I was like, ‘OK, I’ll try it. What the heck.’ And that’s when it started.” (A bit later, he adds an addendum: “My wife had a big part to do with that, just kinda saying, ‘What’s the worst that could happen?’ I was like, ‘We’ll see.’”)
Since Clark had no prior radio experience, he basically learned on the fly. “I listened to a lotta WMSE, and I was like, ‘Yeah, I can do that, I can do that, I can do that.’ And then my hang-up was running all the stuff. Kyle [Pieczynski-Bast] and Sid, they worked with me for, like, a month just gettin’ me to know how to get the songs to play, and how to fit the commercials in, and all those things. And then I was like, ‘Well, why not.’ I couldn’t even sleep that night [before the first show]. I’m like, ‘What do I say? What do I do?’ But then, kinda how I do everything, I slowly waded into it. Just kept going and going, and now it seems pretty easy.”
“Wading into it” might be an apt description of how Clark got into heavy metal. When I ask him to explain his relationship to metal and his history of being a metalhead, he explains that he, too, got into metal via the classics. “So, I’m old. It goes back to, probably, 1977. I saw Kiss Meets The Phantom Of The Park. And from that point on I figured I was gonna be in Kiss. I lived in New Mexico on a ranch, and everybody around me were country-western people. And I was just fascinated with this metal thing, ya know? So then when I turned 13, we moved to Manitowoc, Wisconsin, and all the people that I became friends with were all metalheads.”
Clark’s taste began with the lighter stuff and gradually got heavier. “I started listening to a lot of the hair metal, and then I slowly graduated into the thrash metal that was coming out in the ’80s,” he remembers. “And it’s never really changed. Whatever comes out, I keep evolving with the scene. Mostly thrash, death metal. Some of the hair metal. I like a lotta the European power stuff. Kinda a little bit of everything.” And while thrash metal is his preferred flavor (“If people ask me now, my favorite bands are still Death Angel and Slayer.”), it wasn’t always that way. “It’s kinda how I graduated from hair metal to thrash. A lot of my friends were into hair metal, but somebody had the Show No Mercy record—the first Slayer record—and I heard it and thought, ‘That’s horrible. What the hell is that?’ And then, obviously, after a while I was like, ‘OK, I get it.’”
Like his WMSE peers, there’s at least one artist that Clark doesn’t allow on his show. “I won’t play Iced Earth,” he says with a knowing chuckle. (Here’s why: Jon Schaffer, the founder, guitarist, and primary songwriter of Iced Earth, participated in the January 6, 2021 insurrection, and was later pardoned by President Trump.) “That’s kinda the only guy that I really can think of that I’m just, ‘Nope, not gonna play it.’ As far as philosophy, I get there’s different political things going on or whatever, but they gotta be really douche-y about it before I back out. Jon Schaffer was really douche-y about it.” He isn’t fond of Pantera, either. “I don’t like Pantera too much because they were super-popular. I lived in Madison, and I remember all the frat boys running down State Street going, ‘Fucking hostile!’ It’s like, ‘Oh boy.’” Overall, though, a band’s “gotta be pretty extreme before [he] won’t play it.”
In terms of what is played, Friday Morning Shrapnel is more melodically focused than Into Battle. As such, Clark’s show might be an easier inroad for the curious. “I do prefer the more melodic death metal, the more melodic power metal, over the extreme stuff,” says Clark. “I like the extreme stuff, but I also figure that Jason’s already doing it, so I’ll do something different. Jason already has that little market of the real extreme stuff that nobody’s ever heard. I’m doin’ a lotta stuff that nobody’s ever heard, but I also wanna do the stuff that everybody just wants to hear.”
Unsurprisingly, Clark shares Ellis’ and Vargas’ eagerness to share and discover local music using his platform. “One of my favorite parts of doing [the show] is meeting the people that are making the records,” he says. “There’s so much metal in Milwaukee that, even being a metalhead in Milwaukee, there’s a band where I’m like, ‘What? You’ve been here the whole time?’ And it’s great getting to know them and play their music.” And to that point, Clark is happy to give some love to local metal bands, and maybe even have them on the show. “I love to hear from other musicians and bands. If they have somethin’ they want me to put on, if I go through it and dig it, then I’d definitely love to hear from them. Maybe have ’em in the studio with me. I’ve had a few different bands in the studio with me. They can stay for the whole time, they can just stay for their segment, whatever they wanna do.”
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