BONNIE RAITT: TENACITY, PERSPICACITY

Bonnie Raitt dubbed her latest album “Nine Lives,” not just because it is her ninth LP, but also because of the record’s feline-like refusal to die when her record company declined to release it three years ago.

But the sly humor of the title was lost on a young nephew who told her, “Aunt Bonnie, I really like the record, but I can’t understand why you named it after the cat food.”

“I’m still here and that’s a big thing to me,” said Burbank-born Raitt, 37, who returns home with her five-man band Padlock for her first Southland shows since the album’s August release. She plays Sunday at the Coach House in San Juan Capistrano and Wednesday at the Beverly Theatre.

The tenacity typical of Raitt’s music is also one reason producers of the film “Extremities,” in which Farrah Fawcett portrays a woman who refuses to surrender to an attacker, asked Raitt to record “Stand Up to the Night” for the picture.

Sample lyric: “Where can you run to but somewhere inside your heart?/What can you hold to but all that you were from the start ?”

“I was really pleased that they called me up to do the music to that movie,” Raitt said Wednesday during an interview at her manager’s office in Los Angeles. “I’m proud that I have a reputation for not putting up with people trying to push me down.”

Raitt was surprised, to put it mildly, upon learning in 1983 that Warner Bros. Records, for which she’d recorded since 1971, refused the album she submitted and told her she was free to shop it to other record companies.

“I’d finished the album and it was supposed to be mastered the next day,” she said. “It was frustrating for me, of course, because I’d just spent months and months working on it and had spent quite a bit of my own money on it.”

Even more surprising, though, was her reconciliation this summer with the label.

In reworking the album, Raitt kept four songs from the 1983 sessions, recorded five new cuts this year under different producers and added the separately recorded song from “Extremities,” all of which she admitted “adds to the patchwork quilt effect.”

The result is nonetheless a spirited--she hesitates to call it “definitive”--collection of her blues and R&B-infused; rock treatment of songs by Bryan Adams, Karla Bonoff, Toots (& the Maytals) Hibbert and others. So far, it has sold a respectable 100,000 copies, according to a Warner Bros. spokesman.

Touring for the last 2 1/2 years without a new album was tough, but she and her Padlock band maintained their drawing power through a reputation for consistently invigorating live shows.

Since the summer, however, things have picked up considerably. In addition to headlining numerous clubs and halls around the country, Raitt opened portions of the Stevie Ray Vaughan and John Fogerty tours.

Even longer than she has been playing music, Raitt has been a social and political activist. In fact, she said it was her political interests that originally inspired her to take up folk music in the 1960s.

She welcomes the recent flurry of rock music benefits but is concerned that “if business and the media make too big of a trendy thing out of ‘This Week’s Fad: Rock With a Conscience,’ that will kill it. But once people become touched by something like human suffering, or are truly scared by impending disaster . . . you can’t ignore it anymore.”

She also expresses dismay that well-intentioned efforts have been soured by politically motivated manipulation of food and supplies, as has been reported in Ethiopia.

“The most important thing is that people have true hearts and mean well,” she said. “But we have to follow through on our intentions, even if it means realizing our mistakes and changing some of our policies.”

Immediately, though, following a New Year’s Eve show in Oakland with Huey Lewis & the News, Raitt is looking forward to a long overdue break from touring and recording, during which she plans to “go up north, rest, hike and eat some vegetables.”

With a smile, she added, “I don’t know what I’m going to do at night when it’s 8 o’clock and I don’t have to get ready for a gig.”