Delbert McClinton Still Reveling in R & B : Career: Veteran singer and harmonica player, whose career dates to the ‘50s, opens tonight for Lynyrd Skynyrd in Costa Mesa.

“McClinton and Co.” is how the phone gets answered when you call Delbert McClinton these days. But despite recent career strides, it’s still difficult to imagine the 51-year-old roadhouse warrior helming any business that isn’t headquartered in an Econoline van. The gritty singer and harmonica player has been performing since the late ‘50s, and for most of that time, his life has been a map of one-nighters connected by long stretches of highway.

A new recording deal and a Grammy-winning duet with Bonnie Raitt on the song “Good Man, Good Woman” has helped ratchet the Texan’s career into a higher gear, and these days he’s playing more amphitheaters and arenas, such as his opening slot for Lynyrd Skynyrd tonight at the Pacific Amphitheatre.

Like other great barroom acts such as the Fabulous Thunderbirds, McClinton finds it’s harder to create his sweaty R & B magic in a big hall. Though he feels artists need to move a bit more to fill bigger stages, he isn’t exactly running and jumping about.

“Actually, I’ve been sitting on a stool. I broke my foot about a month ago and had a screw put in it only last week. So I’ve been waving my arms from a sitting position,” McClinton said with typically droll humor, speaking by phone Tuesday night from his home in Nashville, which is where the fledgling McClinton and Co. is based. He’d just returned from taping an edition of TNN’s American Music Shop show. In his 35-plus years in music, McClinton said, he’s “played in rain and when it’s freezing-ass cold or burning hot. A lot of times, it’s been on bills with bands that are so far from the stream I’m in that I’m not actually sure I ever knew who they were. It’s always something.”

Four years ago, he moved from his home state to Nashville. He had a bit of help making the decision.

“The main deciding thing was when the IRS took my house in Texas. I had a tax shelter that got disallowed, and the IRS took everything I had. All of a sudden I owed them a load of money, and they said, ‘Sell your house and give us all your royalties and anything else that we can sell.’ So I thought that might be a good time for a change,” he said with a laugh.

Like most working musicians, if he dwelled on the negative, he wouldn’t have time for much else. Instead, he said, “the little bit in life that does work out, you kind of revel in it.”

McClinton’s house-rocking R & B music was without a record label for most of the ‘80s, compelling him to tour incessantly to keep his career afloat. He thinks that may have worked to his advantage in the long run, giving him a legion of fans now who will support his music no matter how his records fare.

He doesn’t mind at all, though, that he does have a recording career again. He was signed to Curb Records after a label exec was knocked out by one of his performances at North Hollywood’s Palomino club. Though Curb is hardly known as a roots-rock label, “nobody else was beating down the door, so I signed,” McClinton said, “and they pretty much gave me free rein to do what I wanted to do.”

That freedom is evident in the fire he poured into his two albums for the label, the most recent of which is this year’s “Never Been Rocked Enough.” The album was a massive hit in, of all places, Scandinavia. Like Raitt, McClinton has a talent that’s been honed and matured by decades of hard work, without ever losing its passion and drive.

If “Never Been Rocked Enough” has an immediacy that stands out amid today’s overwrought productions, that’s only reflective of the way it was made. The four songs done with star producer Don Was were all recorded and mixed within a week, while the remaining tracks produced by McClinton with veteran sax player Jim Horn were done in three days, using the “Late Night With David Letterman” band when the group had a weekend free.

Along with recently penned songs by McClinton and others, the album includes inspired covers of Bob Marley’s “Stir It Up” and John Hiatt’s “Have a Little Faith in Me.” The Marley song was such a spur-of-the-moment decision, made when only a few hours of studio time remained, that they had to rush out to get a copy of Marley’s recording to learn it.

The Hiatt ballad about the redemptive power of love is sung as if McClinton had lived with it for years, but he’d never heard the song before Was played it for him in the studio. Like Hiatt, McClinton had his troubles with the high life.

“I figured out that you can have it one way or the other,” he said. “You can go on abusing yourself and being crazy and just burn out, or you can get a grip on it and have a life. Fortunately, I’ve been able to do that.”

He and his companion and business manager, Wendy Goldstein--the “Co.” of “McClinton and Co.”--are expecting a child in March.

The “Never Been Rocked Enough” album abounds in guest stars, including Raitt, Melissa Etheridge and Tom Petty.

“If that had been something we’d tried to plan, it would never have come together,” McClinton said. “It was just luck. With Don, we’d be listening to a playback, and he’d say, ‘Boy, Bonnie could sure play a good solo on this.’ . . . ‘Yeah, too bad she’s not in town.’ And then it would turn out she’d gotten in the night before and said, ‘Sure, be right down.’ The same thing happened with Melissa.

“It all happened amazingly easy. And these people said they all did it because they really wanted to, which made me feel real good. I know that I’ve built up some respect among people in the business, but I didn’t expect everybody to be so eager to work with me. Every one of them said to me, ‘Man, this is really fun, something I’ve wanted to do.’ . . . It really pumped me up.”

McClinton said he’s found as many friends among his fans as he has among musicians.

“I find that in traveling around, I’ve made a lot of really good friends, because you meet people who really care about you and really want to know you,” he said. “Of course, there’s always the ones that think you know the secret of life, and you’re scared to death of them. But then there’s the people who are just so really genuine. There’s one guy and his wife I met about eight years ago who actually turned out to be one of my best friends, starting just because they liked the music.”

The music McClinton likes most goes back a ways.

“You’ve got to consider the fact that I come from a time that’s pre-rock ‘n’ roll. So I grew up listening to Bob Wills & the Texas Playboys and Lefty Frizzell and Hank Williams. Then along comes early rock and the black doo-wop groups, and then right behind that I discovered blues, about 1957. All of these things were of tremendous influence on me in my most impressionable time, and they’re still the best to me. I still think Jimmy Reed’s the best and Big Joe Turner and all that stuff that, to me, really did rock--made you feel like having fun,” he said.

“I’m sure that’s the way younger people feel about the music they have today, but the radio just makes me real mad to listen to. Unfortunately, now, if you’re not pretty or real young and very easy to manipulate, the people that could exploit you don’t want you. There is some great stuff I like, though. Stevie Ray (Vaughan) was something that I couldn’t get enough of. God, what a loss, because to me he was an extension of everything I like--the latest thing in that.”

McClinton’s recording history reaches back to playing the harmonica on fellow Texan Bruce Channel’s 1962 hit “Hey! Baby.” That led the then-22-year-old McClinton to a meeting with a pre-Beatlemania John Lennon, which, in turn, led to the one tale that invariably appears in every article about McClinton.

“I wondered why you hadn’t got around to that,” he said. “I was about to think, ‘Boy, this is a first.’ Well, when ‘Hey! Baby’ was No. 1 in England, Bruce got booked there, (and) they wanted the harmonica, so I got to go along. We toured there for a little over a month, and the Beatles were an opening act on about three of the dates we did. John and I got to hanging out together, and he asked me to show him something on the harmonica, which I guess he or someone acknowledged somewhere.

“Somehow it came down to be chiseled in stone that ‘He taught (Lennon) to play harmonica,’ which is a little far-fetched. I have absolutely no idea what I showed him. That was a lifetime ago. We just fooled around playing the harp.”

Many of McClinton’s contemporaries who began working in the late ‘50s have either hung it up or long since settled for doing lifeless oldies-revue tours. Does he ever speculate on why he differs from them?

“I can only speak from my point of view, and for me it’s still fun to go out there and do it. And if you’re truly having fun with it, you can keep it fresh,” he said. “Plus, I think you have to have a particular faith in yourself and be willing to keep on putting it on the line. That’s real difficult to do sometimes, but when you do and it pays off, it sure feels good.”

Delbert McClinton and Lynyrd Skynyrd play at 7:30 p.m. at the Pacific Amphitheatre, 100 Fair Drive, Costa Mesa. $24.75 to $28.05. (714) 740-2000 (Ticketmaster).