Phil Ramone exudes the kind of “oh, get outta here” humility you’d expect from a guy who’s been commended for achieving something noteworthy—like maybe a promotion from head cashier to floor manager at JC Penney—and who’s a little embarrassed by the kudos. He speaks in a steady, calm, almost mesmerizing tone, and is so gracious, it’s not until he nonchalantly, even inadvertently, begins dropping names like “Sinatra” and “Dylan” and “Streisand” and “Pavarotti” that I have a “pinch me” flash of realization: This is the guy who toured with Dylan and the Band on my ultimate Dream Tour, the tour I was too young to experience firsthand—Tour ’74—and recorded one of the first great live albums, Before the Flood, with its iconic Barry Feinstein cover of flicking Bics. This is the guy who produced the seminal albums of my youth—and the youths of younger Baby Boomers and older Gen-Xers—among them Billy Joel’s The Stranger and 52nd Street, Paul Simon’s Still Crazy After All These Years, and Dylan’s magnum opus, Blood on the Tracks.

Yes, he’s arguably the most successful, most sought-after, most celebrated—and most innovative—record producer of the past four decades. Yet talking with Ramone feels comfortable, natural, sort of like talking with a teacher or a mentor or a friend of my father’s. Sure, there’s an undercurrent of hipness, of streetwise New York City straight out of the ’70s. But there’s also eloquence, graciousness—this man is a gentleman. He comes across as quietly sage and has the wisdom of years that compels me to call him “Mr. Ramone” and not “Phil,” until he insists otherwise.

Many have called him a visionary; others, a maverick (a high compliment until John McCain bastardized the term). Some in the industry would say he’s a genius. Though Ramone does have his detractors—those who’ve criticized the so-called “Pope of Pop” for being too commercial, too “poppy,” and those who raked him over the coals for his “virtual” pairing of Frank Sinatra and Bono, calling it “fake”—recording artists in every genre know that Ramone’s name on the production credit is often synonymous with the two big “Gs”: Gold and Grammy.

“There is no comparison between Phil and other producers,” says Grammy-winning singer-songwriter Shelby Lynne, whose critically acclaimed latest album, last year’s Just a Little Lovin’, a collection of mostly reinterpreted Dusty Springfield songs, Ramone produced. “Many people call themselves record producers. Phil Ramone really is one. Working with him is a calm, musical, and magically delicious experience.”

Putting aside his many industry-changing technical innovations (like his introduction of four-track recorders, optical surround sound for films, and a slew of digital recording techniques that have improved the sound quality of recordings by leaps and bounds), consider this: You’re probably more likely to have been struck by lightning than not to have heard one of the scores of records—including 34 Grammy-nominated and 14 Grammy-winning—Ramone has produced, engineered, or both. Despite his enormous success, though, Ramone has managed to keep his ego remarkably in check because, as he readily acknowledges, “People don’t generally applaud the producer.” But that’s just fine with Ramone; he doesn’t do what he does for the applause. “I chose early on to be an engineer and to understand the technology, to encourage [people] how to make better-sounding records,” he says.

And if by “better-sounding records” he means acoustically flawless productions and multi-platinum hits by some of the most prominent and significant artists in the world, then he’s made them in spades, working as seamlessly with Bono as he has with Pavarotti. Genres don’t seem to matter to Phil Ramone.

Maybe it’s because music is in his blood. A child prodigy who began playing violin at the age of three and played before the Queen of England at the age of 10, Ramone was born in South Africa to Minnie and Addie Ramone in 1941 and moved with his parents and sister, Doreen, to New York City in 1946. “I lived in Manhattan for a long, long time,” he recalls, “first at 82nd and Amsterdam, and then for a short while at 72nd and Columbus.” The death of his father, who worked in the sciences when Ramone was a kid, thrust the family into abject poverty, but Ramone—who remembers well the kindness of neighbors who were quick to offer “a hot meal and a warm hug”—was awarded a scholarship to Juilliard. “I went to Juilliard in the prep division on Saturdays, and during the week I took violin lessons.”

Though Ramone had a love and understanding of classical music from an early age, he did not let it limit him. Instead, he thought of it as a foundation. “When I was 10, 11, and 12, I ‘studied’ by listening to records by Charlie Parker and great jazz people, because I really thought I could learn the art of how to create musically,” he recalls. “For me, the classical world was wonderful, but I also wanted to perform, and I was a guest on lots of shows—because when you’re a kid with little short pants and they think you can play really well, they put you on lots of shows.” One of the perks, he says, was that “they’d let me out of school and have special tutors while I was at NBC or other places, and I was studying electronics right alongside the music, from about the age of 12 on.”