The song's success can be equally blamed on Lindsey and Neale Heywood. If Neale hadn't created that riff, the song wouldn't exist. It's the musical backbone of it; the melody has just a few notes in it and wouldn't have the same impact without the riff. Of course Lindsey's perverse mind deserves plaudits as well; he made it into this huge monster.
The musical structure of the song isn't anything new. Quiet verses + loud chorus = arena rock bombast. But the musical shifts of “Come” are done extraordinarily well. It works on the “math-rock” principle of King Crimson’s “Larks’ Tongues In Aspic, Part One” and some of Slint’s pieces. But whereas Crimson and Slint have one shocked with their shifts from very repetitive quiet playing into loud passages immediately, the verses of “Come” don’t really work like that. They sound like they’re pulling you into this strange web. The verse guitar riff on the studio version is so detailed that you already get many images into your head from it. When I heard it the first time, I fell for it completely. It was just me and the headphones. Then it’s suddenly crash, boom and bang! Such a shift of atmosphere that it feels like Lindsey just hit you in the face, really hard. And then the hair-metal solo, which adds the brutality into the proceedings.
The whole thing is not supposed to be serious though. Lindsey stated that himself. I believe he’s just trying to create a caricature of a very obsessive person who can go from one extreme to another. Some lines in the song are a parody on typical macho-like behaviour. “Nobody else is doin’ it!” He might as well add: “I have the largest *bleep* in the world!”, if it already wouldn’t be obvious.
It works tremendously well live. It loses the depth of sound of the studio version and the solo isn’t such a shocking punch to your face. He replaced it with a mighty slap from ye olde Turner, which is fine with me.
Its ideas may not be original, but it still sounds contemporary, although not too much thank God.
I’m sure Lindsey wanted to shake some people up with it. I agree with what PenguinHead said. If someone came to LB and said, “I kinda like ‘Come’”, I’m sure he’d be disappointed.