MANSFIELD, Mass. — There’s always been a battle for control going on within Eric Clapton between the guitar slinger who helped start the British blues revival in the mid-’60s (which not incidentally helped spark a similar resurgence here in the home country of the blues) and the smooth adult-contemporary singer-songwriter he became once he decided there was only so far he could go with the former. Even after his celebrated return to the blues starting in 1994, the dichotomy remained as he released “mature” albums such as Pilgrim and Back Home. Last night at the newly renamed Comcast Center, however, the bluesman won in a rout.

Starting off with the galloping “Motherless Children” and heading into a stomping “Key to the Highway” and a pounding “Hoochie-Coochie Man,” Clapton established that it would be a blues night and didn’t let go until near the end, when he slipped in the pop-oriented “Running on Faith.” And where his voice may not have had the right kind of menace for something like “Hoochie-Coochie Man,” his combination of string-bending and corrosive disharmonies on “Little Wing” and “Tell the Truth” and the Albert Collins-like bursts and stabs during the slow blues “Little Queen of Spades” made up for it.

As is Clapton’s tradition, he gave his second guitarist plenty of free rein, and Doyle Bramhall II responded with a wonderfully nasty tone that beautifully set up, and was set up by, Clapton’s cleaner tone. Bramhall’s primitively distorted solo on “Hoochie-Coochie Man” was a particular delight, as was his honking slide on “Tell the Truth.” He showed the ability to play prettily as well, with birdlike chirping on the minor-key ballad “You Can Make It If You Try.”

A semi-acoustic mini-set in the middle of the show, starting with Clapton seated solo and eventually bringing in the band, broke up the full-electric, keyboard solo-Bramhall solo-Clapton solo routine that had started to set in. Country-esque blues (“Driftin’ Blues”) mixed with old-time acoustic jazz, and Clapton’s easy-going voice was better suited. The sequence reached a high point in an electric, subdued version of Robert Johnson’s “Traveling Riverside Blues” before ending with “Running on Faith.”

Clapton finished off with a run through some of his rock and blues-rock hits by nodding to his ballad side with “Wonderful Tonight,” pushing through a “Layla” that was a bit slow (the incandescent original recording probably can never be matched) and dropped suddenly into a sauntering “Cocaine.”

Robert Randolph and the Family Band opened the show, with pedal-steel whiz Randolph tearing through a series of mostly one-chord stomps that felt like a mix of gospel, demented country blues and a hornless Sly Stone, particularly the joyous “I Need More Love” and “Deliver Me.” Randolph also lent a wonderful chaos to Clapton’s raucous encore “Got My Mojo Workin’.”

The location’s name change was announced in a ceremony yesterday afternoon at the venue. The communications giant has contracted with Live Nation for a 10-year deal on naming rights to the outdoor amphitheatre, which had been known as the Tweeter Center since 1999. It opened as Great Woods in 1986.

rmassimo@projo.com