He acknowledges in Born to Run that his struggles are ongoing, and shares stories from the not-so-distant past. “I was crushed between sixty and sixty-two, good for a year and out again from sixty-three to sixty-four,” he writes. “Not a good record.” Springsteen remained professionally productive during these periods, however, and he says that he recorded his fine 2012 album, Wrecking Ball, at one of his lowest ebbs, with his bandmates none the wiser. (Though, he grants, the song “This Depression” might have been a tip-off.)

A SPRINGSTEEN SHOW OFFERS ALMOST COMIC ABUNDANCE—IN LENGTH, BUT ALSO IN EMOTIONAL DYNAMICS.

But in the privacy of home, he writes, when the blues descend, “Patti will observe a freight train bearing down, loaded with nitroglycerin and running quickly out of track.” Whereupon “she gets me to the doctors and says, ‘This man needs a pill.’ ”

“If I’m being honest, I’m not completely comfortable with that part of the book, but that’s O.K.,” Scialfa told me. “That’s Bruce. He approached the book the way he would approach writing a song, and a lot of times, you solve something that you’re trying to figure out through the process of writing—you bring something home to yourself. So in that regard, I think it’s great for him to write about depression. A lot of his work comes from him trying to overcome that part of himself.”

To some degree, Springsteen said, he has overcome the issues he had with his father. One of the book’s most moving passages occurs a few days before the 1990 birth of Springsteen and Scialfa’s first child, their son Evan. As was his impulsive wont, Doug embarked on an impromptu road trip, driving 400 miles south to Bruce’s house in Los Angeles from San Mateo, where he and Adele had made their home. Over beers at 11 A.M., Doug, uncharacteristically, made a small peace offering to his son. “Bruce, you’ve been very good to us,” he said. And then, after a pause: “And I wasn’t very good to you.”

“That was it,” Springsteen writes. “It was all that I needed, all that was necessary.”

I asked him if he ever heard the words “I love you” from his father.

“No,” he said, a little pained. “The best you could get was ‘Love you, Pops.’ [Switching to his father’s gruff voice.] ‘Eh, me, too.’ Even after he had a stroke and he’d be crying, he’d still go, ‘Me, too.’ You’d hear his voice breaking up, but he couldn’t get out the words.”

IV. Five Guitars Deep

Only half in jest, Springsteen describes touring as his “trustiest form of self-medication,” and you can see why. He was always an exuberant rock performer, but with time, age, and fatherhood (he and Scialfa have a third grown child, Sam, a firefighter, in addition to Evan, who works for SiriusXM, and Jessica), he has evolved into an all-around entertainer, allowing more humor and goofiness into his shows. He gambols along the catwalks that line the stage with a puckered smile and arched eyebrows that recall Robert De Niro in comedy mode (his mom’s sunny Italian side coming out), slapping hands with fans and edging his famous mug into their smartphone frames for mid-song selfies. He pulls small children from the crowds to join him in singing “Waitin’ on a Sunny Day,” a simple pop song from The Rising, his 2002 album. The song didn’t register as a hit in the U.S. but has been embraced by Europeans as a Pete Seeger-style folk sing-along.

A Springsteen show, even a non-four-hour one, offers almost comic abundance—not just in length, but in emotional dynamics, musical variety, and visual richness. Sometimes, there are no fewer than five guitars being strummed on the band’s front line—by Springsteen, Van Zandt, Scialfa, Nils Lofgren, and the fiddler and multi-instrumentalist Soozie Tyrell—with the towering, Afro’d Jake Clemons, nephew and heir of the late, great Clarence Clemons, picking his spots to weave through them all with his tenor saxophone. The three longest-serving E Streeters, bassist Garry Tallent, pianist Roy Bittan, and drummer Max Weinberg, hang back and dress nattily; compared with the flamboyant Van Zandt and Lofgren—the former in his trademark headscarf, the latter in his Artful Dodger stovepipe hat—they look like private-equity guys playing in a weekend hobby band. (Completing the lineup is the organist Charlie Giordano, who stepped in after the death of founding E Streeter Danny Federici, in 2008.)

ABOUT THE BOOK, SPRINGSTEEN SAYS, “I HAD TO FIND THE ROOTS OF MY OWN TROUBLES AND ISSUES.”

Springsteen and the E Street Band remain an enormous live draw. The River Tour ‘16, nominally pegged to last year’s release of The Ties That Bind, a boxed set of the sprawling sessions for his 1980 double album, The River, was originally to encompass a mere 20 dates, but between popular demand and Springsteen’s ardor to perform more, it has expanded to a total of 75 concerts in the U.S. and Europe. As it draws to a close (with a final concert at Gillette Stadium, in Foxborough, Massachusetts, on September 14), it is on pace to be this year’s top-earning international tour; over its first six months, it grossed more than $170 million. Landau, who has been with Springsteen since 1974, told me that when he is recognized by fans “the most common thing I hear is ‘Hundred-and-third show,’ or ‘This is our 45th show.’ ” In terms of loyalty and repeat attendance, he reckons, the only rock act that has topped Springsteen and the E Street Band historically is the Grateful Dead, “and I think we’re in a very respectable second place.”