American bands don't seem to have the staying power of the English. Of the great American bands of the 1960s, only the Grateful Dead remain, and they're rapidly fading into an overproduced haze of disco in their studio albums. Oddly, it's Neil Young--the most inconsistent artist around, hopping from drunken, off-key singing on one album to sugar-coated acoustic pap on another--who has brought out one of his best albums, more than a decade and a half into his career.

Young's new album--one side acoustic, the other electric--is the most honest of these three in confronting the horrible personality disorders of the "too old to rock and roll, too young to die" pop star. One song in particular, "My, My, Hey, Hey"--which gets both acoustic and electric treatments--sums up the sentiment of Rust Never Sleeps.

The king is gone but he's not forgotten

This is the story of a Johnny Rotten

It's better to burn out than it is to rust

The king is gone but he's not forgotten

The electric version, in which Crazy Horse--Young's old backup band restored--bleats out a barbaric triplet after each line, sounds eerily nihilistic, as though Young were trying to convince himself that his alternately cliched and obscure lyrics could lead him to some Fountain of Youth for him and his coevals.

Of course they don't, but for now at least Young can still make a good record, and the whole electric side of Rust Never Sleeps sounds better than anything since After the Gold Rush and reminds us that the man who made Comes A Time hasn't completely sold out. The acoustic side, too, has more interesting lyrics and arrangements than Comes A Time, for those who enjoy understated music.

AS TIME GOES ON, the questions that everyone asked as jokes a decade ago are becoming less and less moot. What will Paul McCartney be doing at 50? Touring the Catskills with Wings, maybe making guest appearances at Grossinger's. How will the generation of rockers that entered the field in the mid-sixties meet the twentieth anniversary of their debuts? Nature has solved the problem for many of them in a swift and clean way, of course, but for those who remain alive, existential crises are on the way. If these albums any indication, it will be a long, painfully extended death-rattle for rock and roll, as some artists clutch their ebbing money-making potential, others sell out, and an occasional few burn like supernovae.