Several days into a late-summer road trip across the US, a man in his early 30s stops at dusk to observe a fair taking place in a small Texas town. A band is playing. A couple dance. “From nowhere,” the man recalls, “a despair overcomes me … right now, all I can think is that I want to be amongst them, of them, and I know I can’t. I can only watch. That’s what I do. I do not engage, and if and when I do, my terms are so stringent, they suck the lifeblood and possibility out of any good thing, any real thing.” A few days later, having reached home, he places a call. Bruce Springsteen is making his first appointment with a shrink.

“So began 30 years of one of the biggest adventures of my life, canvassing the squirrely terrain inside my own head for signs of life,” Springsteen writes at the midpoint of his autobiography, having set a scene that could have come from one of his darker ballads. Already he has introduced the reader to his troubled relationship with a Dutch-Irish father unable to escape a succession of blue-collar jobs – bus driver, prison guard, factory worker – in a nondescript part of New Jersey. It is in this harsh, cold, ungiving man that Springsteen locates the origin of his own flaws and fears.

“As a boy, I figured it was just the way men were, distant, uncommunicative, busy with the currents of the grown-up world.” And angry. At the wheel of a car, “I would use speed and recklessness to communicate my own rage … with the sole purpose of terrorising my rider. It was gross, bullying, violent and humiliating behaviour that filled me with shame afterward … Part of me was rebelliously proud of my emotionally violent behaviour, always aimed at the women in my life. It was all straight out of the old man’s playbook.” Late in life the father is forced to confront full-blown paranoid schizophrenia, but not before he has seen his son march into his house and place an Oscar statuette (awarded for the theme song to Jonathan Demme’s Philadelphia) on the table. “I’ll never tell anybody what to do ever again,” the father declares, and the wounds begin to heal.

His mother, whose parents were immigrants from Naples and Sorrento, taught him other lessons: “Truthfulness, consistency, professionalism, kindness, compassion, manners, thoughtfulness, pride in yourself, honour, love, faith in and fidelity to your family, commitment, joy in your work and a never-say-die thirst for life.” Some of these qualities would be recognised by fans attending the arena concerts in which a man deep into his seventh decade can still spend close to four hours carrying his listeners on an emotional rollercoaster ride with a generosity, an energy, an intimacy and a gift for drama that none of his contemporaries can begin to match.

In a book that bears the hallmarks of having been written by his own hand, Springsteen is particularly good at capturing the exhilaration of his rise to success with the E Street Band, formed as a “benevolent dictatorship” in 1972 after he had grown weary of playing in co-operative groups. “Democracy in rock bands, with very few exceptions, is often a ticking time-bomb,” he writes. “If I was going to assume the workload and responsibility, I might as well assume the power. I’ve always believed the E Street Band’s continued existence is partially due to the fact that there was little to no role confusion among its members. My bandmates were not always happy with the decisions I made and may have been angered by some of them, but nobody debated my right to make them.”

The book is as rich in anecdote and detail as in anguish and doubt. He opens by describing his 10-year-old self accompanying his grandfather to scavenge in rubbish tips for broken radio sets that can be repaired and sold to black workers in summer migrant camps. He talks about his experience as an altar boy with a Catholicism that surely encouraged his underlying sense of guilt and obligation (“I don’t often participate in my religion but I know somewhere, deep inside, I’m still on the team”). Tribute is paid to his heroes – Elvis, the Beatles, the Stones, Dylan and Van Morrison, whose 1968 album Astral Weeks was “the record that taught me to trust beauty” – and he provides a (mostly) grateful boss’s view of his long-term musical sidekicks, notably the late Clarence Clemons, the giant saxophonist whose appearance alongside Springsteen on the cover of Born to Run, the band’s breakthrough album in 1975, helped to overlay “a nice little R&B-flavoured outfit” with the aura of myth.

He remembers the name of the girl who gave him his first kiss, but anonymises his later intimacies, including the girlfriend who inspired the song “Rosalita”, who he believes was the first girl with whom he had successful intercourse – “though, due to the fog of war, I can’t be absolutely sure”. There’s another who broke his heart in the days before success struck: “A drug-taking, hell-raising wild child who played by nobody’s rules. She was a perfect antidote to the control freak in me. She was so alive, funny and broken, I couldn’t resist her. She’d been around, knew a few grade-B-level rock stars, brought them down to ‘discover’ my band, then slept with them.” Investigating the possibilities offered by a rock’n’roller’s moral compass, he retaliated by sleeping with her friend.

It takes him until page 501 to admit – honourably, if a little deflatingly – that “I haven’t told you ‘all’ about myself. Discretion and the feelings of others don’t allow it.” The exceptions to the code of romantic anonymity are his two wives: the actor and model Julianne Phillips, whom he married in 1985; and the singer Patti Scialfa, with whom he took up when the first marriage was faltering and with whom he now has three grown-up children. The break-up with Phillips brings a bleak verdict on his own behaviour: “I dealt with it abysmally.” Scialfa is portrayed as a figure of saintly forbearance and sensitivity.

Overwriting and repetition sometimes make it feel as though he has chosen to issue the literary equivalent of the four-CD deluxe version, complete with demos and out-takes, instead of the finished album itself. The sentimental stuff about his kids could have been tightened up and the occasional splurges of capital letters and exclamation marks require understanding as an attempt to reproduce on the page the comic melodrama of his on-stage storytelling. His editor might have given him better advice on that, as well as correcting a few mistakes. For a songwriter in whose work automobiles have played such a powerful role, it’s strange that a car that starts a journey as a Dodge at the top of a page should mysteriously have become a Pontiac by the bottom.

But this is a man who, after watching other rock’n’rollers respond to material success by losing touch with reality, became determined to make his own music “a search for meaning and the future”. He gave his services to righteous charities and themed entire albums in response to unemployment in the post-industrial wasteland, the 9/11 attacks, the Iraq war and the delinquency of Wall Street. Perhaps that sense of mission – alongside sophisticated medication, the company of his family and the sharing of energy with his concert audiences – is playing a part in repelling the bouts of depression that have continued into his 60s. As he writes: “I was never going to be Woody Guthrie – I liked the pink Cadillac too much – but there was work to be done.” And still is.

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• This article was amended on 21 September. A sentence that confused Gino and Geno Washington was removed.