Linda Ronstadt can no longer sing but the legendary vocalist still has plenty to say

As Linda Ronstadt excavated her personal history to piece together the spoken word shows she’s done since her singing voice vanished she found to her surprise and occasional chagrin that large parts of her life and and career now live for all eternity on YouTube.

“I never knew any of that stuff existed,” says Ronstadt by phone from her home in San Francisco. “There’s stuff on there that I don’t even remember doing. Clothes I don’t remember wearing. So it was interesting to see how hopeless I was walking into walls when I first started.

“I was just musically walking into walls,” says the singer who brings “A Conversation with Linda Ronstadt” to the Cerritos Center on Thursday, Oct. 4, and the Ace Hotel in Los Angeles on Saturday, Oct. 6. “I don’t believe I ever got a career out of what I started out with but for some reason it worked.”

Ronstadt has been inducted into the Rock and Roll Hall of Fame. She’s been honored not only with a Grammy Lifetime Achievement Award but a Latin Grammy Lifetime Achievement Award as well. And she’s widely regarded as among the most successful female singers of the 1970s, so yeah, she’s had a career.

Still, we had to ask: When exactly where you walking into these musical walls?

“Oh, anything I did before 1980,” Ronstadt says, dismissing such hit singles as “You’re No Good,” “When Will I Be Loved,” and “It’s So Easy ” that first made her a star in the ’70s.

“I was still trying to learn how to sing and figure out what my voice was supposed to do authentically,” she says. “It wasn’t until after I sang the Nelson Riddle music that I really found my authentic voice, and then I could use that voice to sing anything I wanted.

“I could sing rock and roll if I wanted or operetta or whatever I wanted. If I’d learned that before I started it would have been helpful.”

This is the kind of plainspoken discussion that has made earlier “Conversation With” shows so popular with fans and critics alike. Ronstadt says she goes on stage to show photographs and videos and play audio clips and shares her unvarnished opinions on the work and the moments from it which emerged.

Her voice started to go a decade or more ago. Her final concert was in 2009, on a tour behind one of her Mexican folk song albums.

“Honestly my entire musical life flashed before my eyes,” Ronstadt says. “I remembered clubs I played and high school gymnasiums I played. It all sort of came flying in front of my face. I knew it was the last show I was ever going to sing.”

It wasn’t until she was diagnosed two years later with Parkinson’s disease that she understood why. Two years after that, her 2013 book, “Simple Dreams: A Musical Memoir,” partly inspired these talking shows when fans urged her to come back and share stories even if she wasn’t on book tour.

She briefly resisted, Ronstadt says.

“It seems a little self-serving,” she says. “People kept saying they really wanted to have it, and I said, ‘No one’s going to want to listen to that!’ Because when I was singing on stage I never said a word, I just sang.

“Now I don’t sing at all, all I do is talk. It seems so silly.”

But the stories she shares connect.

“There’s one part where I found an old cassette tape of a jam session at my house in Malibu with Jackson Browne and J.D. Souther,” Ronstadt says. “And Jackson teaches me ‘Poor Pitiful Me,’ and J.D. teaches me ‘Blue Bayou,’ and there’s a whole sort of conversation that went on during it.

“I played a little bit of that — they liked that,” she says of two of her biggest hits from the decade before she really liked her voice.

Ronstadt, now 72, was born and raised in Tucson but by 18 had traveled west to Los Angeles in search of a musical career.

“The recording industry was concentrated there so it drew people,” she says. “And then according to their various sensibilities they sorted out into different clubs. Like the Ash Grove was very traditional folk music people, and the Whisky A Go Go was for rock and roll people.

“The Palomino was pure country music,” she says. “I played there regularly. You had to have someone stand at the door and count everybody that came in, and you’d get paid in cash.”

But her favorites was the Troubadour in West Hollywood, the only one beside the Whisky that’s still in business some five decades after Ronstadt arrived in town.

“The Troubadour was for some place in between. It was for cafe society and comedians and folk musicians and up-and-coming pop people.”

It was the kind of hangout where musicians mingled with record company people and a good performance might quickly lead to a label deal, Ronstadt says. “If you played a hoot there you’d be sure to be seen,” she says.

“The thing that was so cool was that you could see every show,” she says. “Like when Joni Mitchell played. I watched every show that she did, two shows a night for the weeknights, and three shows a night for the weekends. Every show for the two weeks that she played there.”

She’s matter-of-fact about her disability and the singing voice that she perfected but ultimately lost. Her good friend singer Emmylou Harris used to come by and make music with her on visits to San Francisco, Ronstadt says.

“She’d come over and pull out the guitar and we’d sing a bunch of stuff,” she says. “Now she brings her laundry. We talk about our kids and what we’re doing.”

Ronstadt is from the generation of musicians that believed in their responsibility to speak out when they saw some wrong with the society around them, and she still feels that way today.

“I think democracy is really under siege in a very serious way, ” she says. “I notice things that are very similar to the Wiemar Republic in Germany before Hitler took over, things that are happening here.”

That kind of outspokenness has led to controversy at times in the past such as the 2004 concert in Las Vegas where she spoke out against the war in Iraq and dedicated the song “Desperado” to filmmaker Michael Moore.

“That was such a manufactured crisis,” she says, laughing. “Half the room went ‘yay!’ And then a smaller part went ‘boo.’ I’m reading that people were throwing drinks and stuff like that in the lobby — people throw drinks in the lobby in Las Vegas, that’s one of the reasons they go there, so they can act stupid.

“That was hysterically funny. I saw on television that I’d started a minor riot. It was all manufactured. Fake news, you know.” She laughs.

Now there’s not much more traveling or even spoken-word shows ahead of her. Her disability has gotten to the point that travel is a burden, so she stays home mostly, reads a lot — “The Tea Drinker’s Handbook” is on her lap as she talks, though Michiko Kakutani’s “The Death of Truth” is her serious book at the moment  — and visits with friends and family who stop by.

“That’s what I do,” Ronstadt says. “My kids come over. I have a lot of really good friends here. A lot of support. And that’s nice.”

‘A Conversation with Linda Ronstadt’

When: Thursday, Oct. 4 and Saturday, Oct. 6

Where: Oct. 4 at the Cerritos Center for Performing Arts, Oct. 6 at the Theatre at Ace Hotel in Los Angeles

Tickets: $35-$100 for either show

Information: Cerritoscenter.com or Acehotel.com/calendar/losangeles