Vladimir Noskov—former DJ, gonzo journalist, and regular on The Howard Stern Show in its heyday— died May 6 in his apartment on Cherokee Street. He was 63 and had been suffering from lung cancer, which had left him thin and weak. “Towards the end, he needed around-the-clock care,” recalls his old friend Bill Streeter. “But he just refused any help.”
That orneriness was quintessentially Noskov, who was known for years as “The Mad Russian” for his confrontational interviews with public figures. At a 1996 rally at Kirkwood High, he asked presidential candidate Pat Buchanan, “Who is worse, Jews or Mexicans?” before shouting that Buchanan was a Nazi. Four years earlier, he’d asked Second Lady Marilyn Quayle, “Having Dan Quayle as your husband, don’t you think you’d be better off as a single parent?” (“That’s one of the most ugly things I’ve ever heard,” Marilyn responded. “No I don’t.”)
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Howard Stern favorably compared Noskov to his longtime sidekick Stuttering John. “He’s got some funny stuff,” he told his listeners in 1992. “Quite frankly, I’ll probably hire him instead of John. I’m going to get The Mad Russian.”
Friends say Noskov came to St. Louis at age 14 or 15, part of a Jewish family fleeing persecution in Ukraine, which was then part of the Soviet Union. He soon carved out a name for himself among the creatives who hung out in the still-gritty Delmar Loop (at least, until he was banned for life from Blueberry Hill, for unspecified reasons likely linked to alcohol). He had a reggae show on KDHX (88.1 FM) and made regular appearances on World Wide Magazine, Peter E. Parisi’s famously unhinged public access TV show, which aired in the 1980s. The interviews Noskov did for Parisi—a fellow cab driver also moonlighting as a local media figure—led to his association with Stern, who would repurpose the material, sometimes even featuring Noskov on his show on E! Entertainment Television.
Jim Varagona, who made a documentary about World Wide Magazine for his thesis at Webster University and became its foremost chronicler, spent hours talking to Noskov. “I don’t know how much was completely true,” he says. But Noskov seemed to know everybody. He was supposedly friends with David Lowery of Cracker and the drummer from Fishbone. One celeb he definitely knew, or at least ran in the same circles with, was a young Michael Stipe: Both were featured on the local news in 1978, part of the crew that dressed up for Rocky Horror Picture Show every weekend at the now-defunct Varsity Theatre.
In several ways, he predated our current moment. In 2005, he nearly got deported over a long-ago felony drug conviction, for which he’d successfully completed probation. Post-Dispatch columnist Bill McClellan covered the case, which Noskov was able to resolve successfully. Noskov also had a dramatic falling-out with the management of KDHX, long before that was popular. “His last day on the air, when he knew it was going to be the end, he played ‘Cop Killer’ by Body Count, Ice-T’s band, over and over and over,” Varagona recalls. “That went until like 1 a.m., and at the time that was legendary.”
Among his many other grudges, he hated Ray Hartmann’s Riverfront Times, as he made clear in an early interview with Varagaona. “F— RFT,” he told him. “Ray Hartmann is a punk. Ray Hartmann is an asshole.”
A filmmaker and founder of the long-running Lo Fi Cherokee festival, Streeter believes Noskov was driven by his perspective as an immigrant. “He’s always had this outsider affect, I guess,” he says. “He would needle people and just would find the one thing that bothered somebody. And sometimes he would get really offensive, really outside the bounds of what a lot of people would ever do.”
It wasn’t an act—or, if it was, it bled over into life, too. If there’s one thing friends and acquaintances universally agree on, it’s that Noskov was a pain in the neck. Streeter credits his Eastern European heritage: “Arguing with you was a sign of affection.” But it also seemed mixed with a form of mental illness that made him paranoid and difficult. “Everybody I know had some point in their relationship with him where he would suddenly turn on them and get really nasty, and he would claim he was wronged by them for whatever reason,” says Streeter. “And then he would burn that relationship.”
About three years ago, Streeter says, Noskov got mad about something he can’t even remember and blasted Streeter as a “no-talent hack.” Familiar by then with the pattern, Streeter just ghosted him.
Not long after, in 2023, Noskov got back on The Howard Stern Show for the first time in decades. He explained that he was Ukrainian, not Russian (friends suggest he probably just called himself Russian because ‘90s Americans didn’t know the difference). He said he was going to become a war correspondent, going overseas to chronicle what the Russians were doing to his people. He wanted to be called “The Mad Ukrainian”—and even Stern, who never let anyone change their nickname, said he’d allow it.
Friends say Noskov was serious about his plans, but life took a hard turn when he was diagnosed with lung cancer. That was the end of that. By the time Streeter ran into him again after a long hiatus, at a friend’s memorial last fall, the cancer had taken its toll.
“He’d had a lung removed, and he just looked so frail,” Streeter recalls. “And I felt bad for him, so I kind of reconnected with him, but his mental health was not … you could tell, like he would say things that didn’t quite make sense.”
Noskin needed help, but no one seemed to be around to give it. So Streeter made a point of checking in. He would drive him around, help him with groceries. But when Noskov was hospitalized in April, they found another spot on his lungs. He wasn’t doing well.
On the morning of May 6, Noskov called Streeter to say he needed help. When Streeter came to his apartment, he’d messed up his sheets. Streeter stripped off the old ones, and, after he made him lunch, went to buy new ones. Streeter was worried about him living alone and made some calls to see if he could find a place for him with more support. He checked in by phone, got his social security number. He thought he was making headway.
But when he returned with the sheets, he found Noskov dead. He’d shot himself, seemingly timed to make sure his body would be found. Says Streeter, simply, “He knew I was coming back.”
This Saturday, June 21, friends and frenemies alike will roast and toast Noskov at Pop’s Blue Moon (5249 Pattison Avenue). They’ll tell the stories he would have told, and while they won’t all be pleasant, he surely wouldn’t be surprised by that.
As for Streeter, despite his previous work as a documentarian, he has no plans for a film about his sometimes friend. He expects the event at Pop’s to close out his memories. “Ten years ago or so, I said, ‘Vlad, you have so many interesting stories and experiences, you should like, sit down in front of my camera. Just tell me your stories.’” He was not interested. “He’s like, ‘No, no, no.’ He goes, ‘Somebody will pay me for that.’”
That never happened, but his work is still being preserved. Streeter didn’t know what to do when Noskov’s landlord turned over the contents of Noskov’s apartment to him. “I thought, ‘What am I going to do with this crap?’” But the “crap” turned out to include tapes of Noskov’s old radio shows, as well as other archival material from his World Wide Magazine days. Greg Kessler, who maintains a local punk rock archive, swooped in to preserve it.
Kessler remembers Noskov from his days on the radio. “He was just a presence,” he says. He recalls Noskov interviewing Thomas Robb, the imperial wizard of the Ku Klux Klan, and asking if he’d killed Allan Berg, a Denver shock jock famously gunned down in his own driveway by white supremacists.
“Robb just melted down, screaming, yelling, or at least to my recollection, that’s what happened,” Kessler recalls. “And he finally came back, and he’s like, ‘Alright, alright, I’ll do more of the interview.’ And [Noskov] interviewed for a couple minutes and then he goes, ‘No, really, did you kill Allan Berg?’ And I was like, wow, you have an incredibly big set of balls.”
Kessler says he’s not sure when he’ll get to it, but he will digitize Noskov’s materials. “In 100 years, when somebody wants to find out what the music scene was like in St. Louis, they’ll be able to sit down and go online and hear all this,” he says.
And in that way, The Mad Russian—The Mad Ukrainian—will live on.
