An Eric Clapton show is no more exciting than you’d expect.  The Post cut me a bit more than usual this time.  Read their just-the-facts-ma’am version here. 

Review explodes into three-guitar action commence!

“Clapton is God,” somebody said once, and it’s hard to imagine that the unassuming 61-year-old guitar legend who turned up at Verizon Center Tuesday night wouldn’t find that sentiment embarrassing.  Over the course of a two-hour set that stuck, for the most part, to the biggest hits from his Derek & the Dominos days and his subsequent solo career, Clapton seemed determined to sidestep that famous mid-60s pronouncement, radiating dignity and professionalism rather than star power.  Now aged 61 and not looking a day over, well, 55, Slowhand is too modest a fellow to be called a rock star, much less a diety.  “Journeyman” is the name of the 1989 album from which Clapton took three of the evening’s 17 songs (playing nothing of more recent vintage save for the title track from last year’s “Back Home” LP), and the title suits him. 

In practice, this meant not just allowing guitarists Derek Trucks and Doyle Bramhall II to share his spotlight, but occasionally, to upstage him, as on the showstopping medley of Robert Johnson’s “Little Queen of Spades” and the Joe Medwick/Don Robey blues standard “Further on Up the Road” that provided the evening’s high point.  While Clapton dutifully served up the solos the crowd had paid for, he looked happiest when stepping back to admire collaborators like Robert Cray, who opened the show and returned during Clapton’s headlining set to assist on the smoldering blues lament “Old Love” (which he co-wrote with Clapton) and again for the encore number, “Crossroads.”  If some of the standards, particularly Bob Marley’s “I Shot the Sheriff” and Clapton’s own syrupy, deathless “Wonderful Tonight,” sounded phoned in, other concert staples, most notably “Motherless Children,” “Got to Get Better in a Little While” and J.J. Cale’s “Cocaine,” were shot through with a new vigor, thanks mostly to drummer Steve Jordan.  Unfortunately, the presence of so many aces in Clapton’s eight-piece band contributed to the sense of anonymity from the evening’s nominal star.  How to overcome this?  Hey, I know:  Maybe he should do an “Unplugged” album!