In my mind, the Vanlose Stairway of Van Morrison's song was always a majestic affair; not quite the full Scarlett O'Hara, but certainly something with a little grandeur. I'm not sure when I learned that it was, in reality, not much more than a flight of stairs running to the fourth floor of a plain apartment block in Copenhagen, but when I looked up the picture again this week, I was struck by the building's ordinariness: pale brick, small balcony, broad, blank windows.
In the early 1980s, Morrison stayed at an apartment here with a girlfriend named Ulla Munch. She inspired much of the material from his 1982 album Beautiful Vision, including Vanlose Stairway. Morrison referred to this song as "a Twenty Flight Rock" – a nod to Eddie Cochran's fabulously euphemistic 1957 hit about climbing 20 flights to see his "baby", only to find on his arrival that he is too tired to "rock".
Van's stairway song is a little more spiritual – sewn with references to Krishna, the Bhagavad Gita and the Bible. And it's a little more romantic, too: "And your stairway/ Reaches up to the moon," he growls, "And it comes right back/ It comes right back to you." Here, alongside the moonlit wooing and the spirituality, there is even room for a few references to John Lee Hooker's Send Me Your Pillow and Little Richard's Send Me Some Lovin', too.
It is one of my favourite Morrison songs, a perfect ball of love and desire, belief and rock'n'roll, and, perhaps more oddly, one of the most frequently performed songs at his shows. Peter Mills, in Hymns to the Silence, refers to it as "this dark horse of a song" – a way to describe the surprising appeal of a song that was never a hit, but has proved compelling to many.
Beautiful Vision is not one of Morrison's most critically feted albums. In his recent book Listening to Van Morrison, Greil Marcus numbered it among the 15 Van albums he would happily write off, consigning it to "the endless stream of dull and tired albums through the 1980s and 90s, carrying titles like warning labels … a string of records where Morrison seems to attempt to reduce whatever might be elusive, undefinable, and sui generis in his music to parts that can never recombine into a whole."
There are Morrison albums I like better, but Beautiful Vision has never struck me as dull; on the contrary, its particular strangeness has always proved appealing – an exploration of Celtic heritage, distance, reminiscence, spirituality and the writings of Alice Bailey. Its most commercial track is Cleaning Windows, a wistful tale of a stint as a window cleaner, that marries the pleasures of physical work and sensory delights – bakery smells, Paris buns, and smoking Woodbines – to a time of expanding artistic and intellectual vision, of playing sax on the weekend, listening to Jimmie Rodgers on a lunch break, reading Kerouac and Christmas Humphreys, hearing Leadbelly and Blind Lemon on the street.
Cleaning Windows, like the rest of Beautiful Vision, seems to me an attempt to explain how a spiritual, emotional life does not exist in isolation, how the lemonade and Paris buns are as stirring as the Kerouac, and how the memory of both can be tethered to those "wrought iron gate rows". This has always been what I loved about Morrison: more than any other songwriter, he seems blessed with a transformational power, with the ability to bring a beautiful vision to even the most humdrum objects and events – the "clicking, clacking of the high-heeled shoe", the "crack in the windowpane", the "decent sherry" and the "drop of port", and "this letter-box behind this door here …"
And perhaps this spurs Vanlose Stairway, that dark horse of a song, perhaps it is simply the strange and beautiful majesty of finding the Gita, and the Cochran, and the moonlight, in the pale brick, small balcony, and broad, blank windows of an ordinary apartment block in Copenhagen.
-Laura Barton
