Not Dinosaurs-- Giants

By JAY COCKS

This is sweet. It shouldn't be, probably wasn't meant to be, but still is. Sweet to see two rock-'n'-roll stalwarts, still formidable, bearing down hard, unmindful of age or fashion, getting back to basics with a worldly vengeance. For Neil Young that means the kind of raw, saber-toothed rock that has always lurked on the flip side of his folkie heart. For Eric Clapton it amounts to a return to the blues. But there are no elder statesmen to be heard on Young's new album, Sleeps with Angels, or on Clapton's From the Cradle. These are two paragons, playing and singing with sidelong majesty, determined not to let themselves get ossified into legend.

After a deceptively gentle start with My Heart, Young steps forward with a few pertinent reflections on longevity in Prime of Life. The man who once announced so adamantly that "it's better to burn out than it is to rust" now summons up autumnal reveries of shadows climbing a garden wall and the first leaf that falls. The aging but still loving couple in the song inquire gently after each other's welfare, reassert their love and realize, "It's the prime of life, where the spirit grows/And the mirror shows both ways."

That mirror is like the witching glass in Snow White. Elsewhere on the album, it can reflect dark corridors as Young free-associates, remembering on the title track, for example, a friend who died too soon. In the second verse of Western Hero, Young sounds as if he had been touched by the D-day memorials just past, but instead of summoning old shades once again, his lyric constructs a taut envoi to American idealism.

Like a lot of Young's other recordings, Sleeps with Angels combines reverie and disillusion in equal measure. A feisty, scruffy throwaway like Piece of Crap, an assault on environmental hypocrisy, shows that Young passed along more than a taste for worn plaid shirts to those upstarts in Seattle. (The current generation of rock musicians considers Young something of a godfather.) The tune has a snarling, implacable drive and guitar work that can make your back fillings vibrate.

The album's centerpiece is a 14 1/2-minute song called Change Your Mind that is equal parts rhapsody and guitar dementia and that describes the full course of a difficult love affair. It's a great Young song, clear of eye, bold of heart, with enough digressions to make it sound like something played live, for the first time, from some ghostly Fillmore stage. There is even a harmony in the chorus that is near Beatlesesque. On its own, this song is a demonstration that Young never has to worry about the depredations of rust. He has performed a classic Young leapboth backward and forward. Bymaking one of his periodic reunions with Crazy Horse, the stormy band that shakes him loose and with which he recorded his classic early albums, Young has given himself a permanent lease on renewal.

Eric Clapton moves more gingerly. He first made his reputation as a blues player of high funk and preternatural fingering, but on From the Cradle things are clearly different. The playing doesn't blister, and the voice doesn't challenge. Something else is happening here, and it has been received with some reservation. It's a familiar argument: Clapton is too slick, too successful to have the blues, much less play them. It's as if he was being criticized for the undoubted elegance of his wardrobe rather than the unchallenged finesse of his picking.

This sort of silly reflection often follows in the wake of great success, and so it has been with Clapton. The sales of his last album, Unplugged, with its heart-rending and (for a time) inescapable single Tears in Heaven, all seem to have counted against him this time in the eyes of critics. And it is true that on From the Cradle, which comprises 16 classic blues numbers ranging from the Willie Dixon war-horse Hoochie Coochie Man to Lowell Fulson's Sinner's Prayer, Claptons playing lacks fire. But in its place he brings a great worldliness, something that sounds like wisdom.

Blues Before Sunrise begins the album and sets the tone. It's a wary, weary kind of blues, and Clapton puts it over like a man groggy from an overdose of bad luck. By the time he reaches the album's midpoint, James Lane's Blues Leave Me Alone, Clapton has navigated the shoals of despair and is heading for very deep waters. There was a time when he practically lived at those longitudes,but like some explorer using charts from his first voyage, Clapton now tacks with more assurance. He knows the winds, and he's been through the storms before. They pass.

That feeling of a sure and steady hand is what some have mistaken for complacency. But Clapton takes nothing for granted. You can hear him bend the low-key bravura of It Hurts Me Too into a plea as strong but uninsistent as a prayer. There may be something cosmopolitan about the blues on From the Cradle, but that quality doesn't come from spurious sophistication. It originates, rather, from some wider experience of the world and a consequent deeper sadness. It does not snarl. It whispers, the sound of a hard traveler halfway along a dark road.