POP MUSIC REVIEW : Raitt’s Not Just Trusting to Luck : The veteran performer, who will be at Irvine Meadows Sunday, brings a crusadelike verve to her San Diego show.

Although Bonnie Raitt fully deserved the success of her 3-million-selling, three-Grammy-grabbing “Nick of Time” album in 1989, it may be more than coincidental that she titled her follow-up album “Luck of the Draw.” In her two decades as a performer, Raitt has been shuffled around by the music business enough to know that excellence has little to do with success. Hundreds of artists far less deserving than she have clogged the charts while ones as good or better will probably play out their lives in obscurity.

In any case, Raitt clearly isn’t taking her success for granted, given the crusadelike verve she brought to her performance at San Diego’s Starlight Bowl Wednesday evening (she and John Prine, who opened the San Diego show, will be at Irvine Meadows Oct. 20).

Raitt took pains to distance herself from the artifice and button-pushing routine that constitute many rock shows, making statements in support of music that’s “the real thing,” and more persuasively making the point with her voice and guitar. She does enjoy her Madonna digs, though: At one point, she acknowledged the capacity audience’s applause by declaring, “Maybe there is somebody who knows what sexuality is all about, instead of grabbing your crotch in front of 8 million people.”

While some of Raitt’s more sultry numbers incline toward the horizontal, her set placed sexuality in context, with the depth, emotion and difficulties that come with the package. Unlike many of her graying peers, she seems aware that the way to keep rock’s passion and honesty in midlife is to address the concerns that come with aging. Raitt may have missed the boat on metal-studded underwear, but her performance did touch on the disillusionment of midlife, the widening awareness of the gulf between souls and the near-impossible work of bridging it.

Raitt always has had a fine ear for picking songs she can feel, and she has recently been writing ones of her own to match. Many of her old concert favorites were absent Wednesday--including “Me and the Boys,” “Runaway,” “Love Has No Pride” and “What Do You Want the Boy to Do”--but they weren’t particularly missed.

Instead, she built the 18-song, double-encore set around her two recent albums. She took fresh musical liberties with her two biggest hits, offering a slow, serpentine version of John Hiatt’s “Thing Called Love” and recasting her own “Nick of Time” with a pulsing rhythmic interplay between drummer Ricky Fataar (briefly a Beach Boy in the early ‘70s) and percussionist Debra Dobkin. It had the effect of heightening Raitt’s real-life joy in finding love without diminishing the fears expressed in the song of growing old alone.

Raitt’s singing has never been better than at this point in her career, full of fire and finesse yet still having the grain and slight rasp that personalizes it. Her voice was put to the test on the set’s two pivotal songs. During “I Can’t Make You Love Me” from “Luck of the Draw,” she brought an almost unbearable ache to the lyrics, touching on the resignation and clutching hope in the last night of a one-sided love.

She played the flip side just as well on her own exuberant, Stones-riffed “Come to Me,” expressing the joy of finally finding someone after years of tough waiting:

“I don’t need another well-spent night,

Another clever sideways glance.

I wanna look my baby in the face

And know there’s nothin’ left to chance.”

That joyful mood of finding an overdue heart carried into Paul Brady’s “Not the Only One,” which Raitt dedicated to her husband, actor Michael O’Keefe. Other songs in the set included “Something to Talk About,” “Papa Come Quick (Jody and Chico),” Bonnie Hayes’ “Have a Heart,” the Stax oldie “Your Real Good Thing (Is About to End),” the Don Covay-penned, Wilson Pickett-screamed “Three Time Loser” and, during an encore, Elvis’ 1959 “A Big Hunk o’ Love.”

Like the late Lowell George had, Raitt has a slide guitar style that seems an extension of her voice, with the same grainy quality and turns of melodic phrasing. Her six-piece band was scarcely less empathetic, playing with a free immediacy while still giving the arrangements a nearly studio-perfect sheen.

(Their music certainly was strong enough to override the one less-than-pastoral feature of the Starlight Bowl: Besides being under the stars, it directly beneath the flight path of the nearby airport. The show could have been titled Bonnie and the Jets. A parade of noisy commercial liners flew directly overhead, so close that their landing lights created a strobe effect on the crowd and acrid jet exhaust filled the amphitheater. Had they flown any nearer, the flight attendants could have passed out honey-roasted nuts to the crowd.)

Closing the evening was a sterling rendition of John Prine’s “Angel From Montgomery,” with Raitt joined by opening-act Prine, who has never looked so fine as he did here, resplendent in a gigantic spangly Mexican sombrero.

As she did with NRBQ and blues great Charles Brown on her tour last year, Raitt is trying to give some exposure to artists who are as woefully neglected as she had been until recently. There are few American performers more deserving of recognition than Prine, who in a just world would be this country’s poet laureate by now. Raitt is at least introducing him to some new fans, judging by the encore-getting ovation that followed his set.

Sombrero or no, Prine has a rare Mark Twain-like humor, both wry and absurd; he is able to capture the small joys and ridiculous tragedies of life. He’s no less sensitive to the darker threads in the American fabric, with an eye for detailed realities that make a song unforgettable: giving a child’s-eye view of a broken war vet in “Sam Stone” (“There’s a hole in daddy’s arm, that’s where the money goes”) or recalling a rural retreat of his youth in “Paradise” (“where the air smelled like snakes”).

Prine’s 14-song set--which was assisted by Chris Isaak’s bassist Rolly Salley and L.A.’s Brothers Figaro, Phil Parlapiano and Bill Bonk on guitars, keyboards, accordion and mandolin--drew from the nether ends of his career. From his 1971 debut album came “Sam Stone,” “Hello in There”--still one of the most moving songs on age and loneliness ever written--and “Your Flag Decal Won’t Get You Into Heaven Anymore,” which does have a way of becoming topical again every so often:

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“Jesus don’t like killing no matter what the reason’s for

And your flag decal won’t get you into heaven anymore.”

Highlights from the current “The Missing Years” album included the wordplay-filled “The Sins of Memphisto” (which musically seemed curiously like the Cream obscurity “Anyone for Tennis”) and “All the Best,” a distinctly bitter “I wish you well” song:

“I wish you don’t do like I do

and ever fall in love with someone like you.”

Prine noted that his recent divorce came through on Christmas, which may have prompted the lines: “I guess that love is like a Christmas card/You decorate a tree/You throw it in the yard.”

Bonnie Raitt and John Prine play the Irvine Meadows Amphitheatre, 8800 Irvine Center Drive, Irvine, Sunday, Oct. 20, at 7 p.m. Tickets: $18.50 to $25. Information: (714) 855-8096.