I am curious do you have a different suggestion for a LISP implementation for working through SICP other than CLISP or would you agree this is a good choice?
SICP is squarely based in Scheme. One of the two authors of SICP is Gerald Sussman. Sussman, together with his then student, Guy Steele, invented Scheme.
GNU project's Common Lisp implementation is a project called GCL: GNU Common Lisp, a descendant of Kyoto Common Lisp.
Also, your analogy that Common Lisp to various Schemes and Clojure is like C to Java/Rust/Python is severely flawed in multiple ways.