POP MUSIC : All The Raitt Moves : Everything seems to be going right in the pop-blues singer’s life. So why is she still uneasy?

Personally and professionally, Bonnie Raitt is a symbol for survivors. Like most people who’ve been through substance-abuse recovery programs and found light at the other end, she’s a firm believer in leaning upon a “higher power.”

And in recounting recent events in her life, there might seem to be a kind of providence involved: Not long after giving up drinking, she recorded an album (“Nick of Time”) that sold 3 million copies, swept the 1990 Grammy Awards and resuscitated her career. Soon after, she fell in love with actor Michael O’Keefe and, at 41, married for the first time.

But having seen the lives and careers of no-less-deserving friends and blues and folk contemporaries go sour even as her own happiness took a sudden upward trajectory, Raitt is also an ardent believer in--even more than providence--pure, dumb, unjust chance.

“Five years ago I was not having any of this wash over me like this,” Raitt says. “I wasn’t anywhere near as secure or happy, and truly wouldn’t even have been able to imagine being married and having four Grammys and being sober. That’s why the new album’s called ‘Luck of the Draw.’ It’s really what you’re dealt.

“I mean, it’s karmic, of course, but it also is arbitrary. Because if it’s fair for me to win four Grammys, what makes it fair for somebody to get AIDS? . . . Why did Paul Butterfield and Lowell George die, and Stevie Ray Vaughan and John Hiatt and me get through, and then Stevie Ray dies in a helicopter crash? ‘Why the angels turn their backs on some, it’s a mystery to me’ is the point of this record. I don’t understand it and I don’t pretend to.”

In lieu of rationalizing her own royal flush, Raitt tries to make a point of boosting those whom the fates have dealt less promising hands--specifically, underachieving fellow artists. Long a supporter of “progressive” political causes (anti-nuclear in the old days; the Christic Institute and an abortion-rights agenda nowadays), she is even more vocal in being the greatest public champion and cheerleader of many pioneering blues, folk and R&B; artists, exposing a mainstream audience to her unsung heroes through duets, key tour slots and other plugs.

Raitt’s agitated empathy for her fellow sufferers in the blues is driven by still-fresh memories of how recently she too was ignored in the marketplace. Even now, she’s not sure that her success with the last album wasn’t a fluke, that the new album might not be a flop, that she might not return to being a “cult” artist someday.

“People get sick of hearing recovery lingo, but you do learn about ‘one day at a time,’ and basically the only thing I’ve learned is that I really can’t worry about what I can’t control--whether the marriage is going to work out or whether the album’s going to be a hit,” she says.

“I’m not worried one way or another, because I can go back to playing (clubs like) the Coach House. That kept me alive for a while.”

Walking through the circular halls of the Capitol Records tower in Hollywood recently, Raitt--whose casual uniform still includes de rigueur tattered jeans and red cowboy boots--remarks that the label that picked her up, ironically, will also soon be reissuing on compact disc some of the theatrical work recorded by her father, Broadway actor John Raitt.

Upon reaching a conference room, Raitt settles into a chair and recalls that her best break after signing with Capitol came when she met producer Don Was. He’s a kindred R&B-loving; spirit who was introduced to her through mutual acquaintance Hal Wilner, for whom she recorded a track on “Stay Awake,” an album of songs culled from Disney movies.

Was jumped at the chance to produce Raitt’s Capitol debut, “Nick of Time”--her customary blend of bluesy sass and gentle balladry--and their collaboration continues with the new album.

“When it came down to it, it was a co-producer relationship,” says Raitt, who is billed as such this time, noting that she’s always been intricately involved in picking even minute instrumental sounds for her records.

“We really lucked into a charmed situation when I met Don. You take any of those little pieces away--me getting sober, me making the Disney album--why would you ever even want to go back and try to explain?

“If I hadn’t picked up the phone that day when Rita Coolidge called and asked me to be in this homeless benefit video and Michael (O’Keefe) was there, I wouldn’t have met him, probably. Your life changes, and you just have to get philosophical about it at some point.”

Raitt’s professional life hit its nadir in the mid-’80s, as her commercial stock sank lower and lower until she was finally dropped by her longtime record label, Warner Bros., after nine albums.

“Yeah, I was bitter, at making work that was being ignored,” she says. “I don’t expect to be No. 1, but when record companies sank below the level of even being able to get records into the towns I was playing and make sure that the 100,000 to 200,000 people that wanted to buy my records got a chance to find them in the stores, I got pissed.

“But I was more bitter and angry about a lot of other things, and personally just brokenhearted. What does bitter mean? I’m bitter every time Jackson Browne can’t get airplay because his music is too political. I wish the Democratic Party had a decent candidate. I wish Ry Cooder was president of the airwaves.

“I wish blues people got appreciated while they were still alive. I mean, dream on; I’ve been like this since I was a kid. You’d have to be pretty naive not to be realistic, having grown up with counterculture values in a culture that is mainstream.

“How many times can you put a record out? How many blues people can die before you just run out of steam? Drinking ain’t gonna help, either. It doesn’t make you feel any better.”

For years, Raitt was mostly a vocal interpreter who relied on other writers’ songs to express her own attitudes. But the success of “Nick of Time” and the positive reaction to three of her own compositions on that album made her pursue her songwriting with greater diligence this time.

She wrote four of the songs on the new “Luck of the Draw,” and they’re strongly autobiographical. “One Part Be My Lover”--which O’Keefe co-wrote--sprang from a hard-hitting poem he penned for her during an early downturn three months into their courtship.

“I had been acting completely squirrelly,” she admits. “In one two-hour period I’d act like he was the greatest thing since sliced toast, and the next moment I couldn’t even look at him. He was feeling like a yo-yo, and I knew I was doing it and I couldn’t do anything about it.

“But I had wanted to stay nobody’s girl, really. I wanted to be single for a while, and he was encroaching on my territory. I didn’t want to admit that I liked him so much, so I was pulling away a lot.”

Explaining her reluctance to commit, Raitt says, “I’d lived with people since I was 18--really, the first time I was ever single was at 37--and suddenly I found I kind of liked being in my house by myself. I was newly sober and really wanted to develop a relationship with me.

“I wasn’t looking to get involved--it was the last thing I wanted--but as they always say, ‘When these things happen. . . .’ ” And we kind of gently went through it. It took a year before we decided to make a commitment. It’s not like we jumped out of the sack and into the altar.”

The new song Raitt says is most personal for her, “Tangled and Dark,” came about another few months into the relationship when, having her own message to get across to O’Keefe, she wanted to write about the thornier side of sharing long-lasting intimacy--troubled recesses “that if you’re just living together you don’t necessarily have to get into.”

“And at this point in my life,” she says, “I kind of either wanted to get serious or move on. You don’t have as much time to wait for three or four years to see if it’s gonna pan out, because if you want to have kids, who wants to wait five years at this point, in your 40s, if it’s not going anywhere? You want to get to the meat of it.

“I realized in the process of needing to get serious that I was gonna have to examine all this frightening stuff that I kept avoiding in other relationships by losing interest or leaving or having an affair or all those things you do. I could tell that if we lived through that process, we were probably gonna get married--and that’s what happened.”

Raitt, whose personal life had never come under much public scrutiny before, says she was a bit surprised at the interest in her and O’Keefe’s courtship. “Good old Rolling Stone put our picture in there a couple times. It kind of midwifed the relationship at different points,” she jokes.

“The thing about being married to an actor is now that I’ve finally got some career security, actors are always in that arena where they have to constantly be up for things and do or don’t get ‘em or things in development fall through. Here I am with no rest now because I care about Michael’s career too, rising and falling just like I was with record company stuff. I’m there for him, get excited when he gets excited, get pissed off when he’s pissed.Pretty interesting two-career family.”

Raitt’s marriage doesn’t mean she’ll put a complete stop to what she calls “women’s blues songs”--sad numbers like John Prine’s “Angel From Montgomery” and her own new “All at Once,” which comes from the dour point of view of a single mother with an ungrateful teen daughter and a lover who won’t leave his wife, before kicking into a hopeful chorus addressed to that “higher power.”

Speaking of what passes for a woman’s perspective in modern song-craft. . . .

“At least we didn’t talk about Madonna,” Raitt says, half-jokingly combative. “Don’t get me started!”

Should we? Raitt sounds like she has a bone to pick.

“I don’t know,” she says, sounding weary now that she’s brought it up. “I read some of these (Madonna interviews) and think, ‘I feel so much worse after reading this than I did before.’ You know what I mean? It’s kind of like driving by an accident. You can’t stop reading, but . . . I feel like I’m in Germany before the war or something, with all this decadence for its own sake. I think I’ll have to go see ‘Dances With Wolves’ again to get an uplifting experience with real values.”

Raitt’s own persona--toughened by time and eminently self-revealing--represents a happy medium in pop between Madonna’s tough tartness and the flowery vulnerability of more traditional pop divas, with appeal even among a generation weaned on machines and hard-boiled attitude.

“Now 18-year-old women that work in the Gap tell me stories about how when they were younger their mom used to play my records--when I still had records that people played--and they never got it. And then of course they went through a period when they liked only new wave and all that stuff, and now they’re dressed in Grateful Dead garb and think that me and Jackson Browne are OK.”

Newfound mass acceptance aside, Raitt, who is warming up for a summer tour, figures she has an even tougher row to hoe in the ‘90s than she did in the ‘70s. Then, she was a bit of a novelty act by virtue of being a woman who plays the slide guitar; nowadays, she’s virtually a novelty act just for adhering to eroding pop and blues traditions.

“I wouldn’t say that I was a cutting-edge artist when I was 28, and I’m certainly not one now, but what I represent now is more important and more unusual than when I was 28. There were more Linda Ronstadt records, and we and Maria Muldaur and Emmylou Harris were all doing similar kinds of records then.”

Despite her own career success, you get the sense Raitt won’t rest easy until her blues heroes--including singer Charles Brown, whom she took on tour last year--get their Grammys and hit singles too, an admirable quest so clearly quixotic that it may well keep her from ever becoming complacent.

“I just would like to see before this whole other generation of R&B; singers really becomes obscure that they get to be rewarded too,” she says passionately. “I’m not just saying this out of guilt. I mean, I really want people to be exposed to these guys that knock me out.

“Once you give people a taste of that stuff, they tend to like it. Maybe if you get enough beer commercials and 501 ads where there’s slide guitar and harmonica. . . . Now it’s only on soundtracks for TV shows and truck commercials. You’ve got Al Anderson (of NRBQ) singing in Toyota commercials. There’s all kinds of slide guitar on the ‘Simon and Simon’ soundtrack. Where is it on the radio?

“That’s my job, to get that kind of slinky R&B; back on the radio where it belongs. I’m gonna grease up the airwaves.”