BOOK REVIEW : Pop Guru Goldman Recycles ‘60s Articles : SOUND BITES <i> by Albert Goldman</i> ; Random House/Turtle Bay Books; $22; 299 pages

Anthologies are the last refuge of the journalist who has run out of things to write about. But “Sound Bites,” a collection of magazine pieces and book excerpts by venerable pop culture chronicler Albert Goldman, is one cut-and-paste job that still has something to say about rock ‘n’ roll.

Goldman offers a brief, almost beseeching preface in which he argues that his yellowing clips are new again, thanks to the enduring popularity of the music and music-makers of the ‘60s. And Goldman, who is something of a Golden Oldie himself, invites us to find out what it was really like when the juice still flowed into the amps of Elvis Presley and John Lennon, Jimi Hendrix, Janis Joplin and Jim Morrison.

Goldman earned a reputation as a kind of shock-and-shlockmeister of pop culture, thanks mostly to his dish-it-out biographies of rock celebrities, and he generously excerpts his own “large-scale lives” of Presley and Lennon in “Sound Bites.” And so, for example, we are treated to the inside story of the abortive love triangle of John Lennon, Phil Spector and Ronnie Bennett of the Ronettes during the first North American tour of the Beatles.

“She was a 20-year-old virgin,” Goldman explains. “She was saving ‘it’ for Phil.”

Most of the pieces in “Sound Bites,” however, go back to the late ‘60s, when Goldman--”a middle-aged Columbia University professor with long hair and granny glasses”--was interpreting the grotesqueries of rock ‘n’ roll to the readership of Vogue, Holiday and New York magazines and the New York Times.

As if to establish his credentials, Goldman dressed up his breathless celebrity journalism with the insistent scholarly allusion of a man who holds a Ph.D. in Comp. Lit. When Goldman contemplates the blues of Albert King, for instance, he is reminded of “Achilles shouting down the walls of Troy.” The chugging sexual metaphor of the boogie-woogie strikes him as “the most extravagant feat of musical mimesis since the storm sequence in Beethoven’s ‘Pastoral.’ ”

Goldman has not bothered to buff out the tool marks in these artifacts of what was once called the New Journalism. In the epochal year of 1968, writing on deadline, Goldman confided to the readers of New York magazine that Jimi Hendrix was “the only thing live and moving on the current rock scene.” Then he turned around and filed a piece for Vogue in which he rhapsodized over Jim Morrison as “the one authentic sex hero of the current generation . . . most admired figure on the American rock scene.”

Goldman is perfectly willing to puff his favorites, which include Little Richard (‘the greatest basic rock performer”), James Brown (“the one man in America who can stop a race riot in its tracks”) and even Michael Jackson: “In his dance soliloquies, the motions of his mind are projected like T. S. Eliot’s “magic lantern that threw the nerves in patterns on a screen.”

At the same time, he trades in a mild irreverence toward the royals of rock ‘n’ roll. “Compared to the extravagantly endowed Elvis,” he writes, “the Beatles were dinky little songsters who resembled fiddling mice atop a music box, which is exactly how they seemed to the ‘King.’ ”

But even the King draws Goldman’s iconoclastic attention. Goldman’s critical eye is drawn to what he describes as Presley’s “fish-belly complexion; his brooding Latin eyes, heavily outlined in mascara; his Greek nose and thick, twisted lips; his long greasy hair, thrown forward into his face by his jerking motions--God! what a freak he looks. . . .”

Some of the critical asides may strike the reader as obscure--Goldman’s dismissive reference to “the adolescent moralisms of Janis Ian” belongs in a game of Trivial Pursuit--and a few of Goldman’s old enthusiasms are downright embarrassing. In 1970, Goldman discerned “the red dawn of revolution” in, of all things, the rock opera “Tommy,” which he hailed as “this youthful ‘Eroica.’ ”

Goldman, so much older now and seemingly embittered by what has become of the American civilization, succumbs to moments of gloominess in the brief chapters that he wrote especially for “Sound Bites.” Indeed, the man who once celebrated the counterculture now moans about “the decadence of the youth culture” that is “oozing” across “the urban wasteland.”

“The fact is that the escape from civilization,” he writes, “is as much a death march as it is a flight to life.”

Still, the real message of “Sound Bites” is that rock ‘n’ roll is yet capable of surprising us, invigorating us, even redeeming us.

Significantly, Goldman has chosen to conclude his book with an upbeat 1984 piece from “People” about Michael Jackson, in which he gets rather too excited about the “fiery cherub and glittering superstar.” But Goldman also manages to remind us of the sheer power of music to transcend even the most cynical manipulation of what he calls “the Fashion-Rock-Film axis.”

“He is the latest of our pop messiahs,” Goldman writes, “these boy heroes, unknown to any other time, whose periodic advents have become one of the primary rhythms of our culture and whose tumultuous triumphs constitute its most thrilling ritual of renewal.”