So Pollard's decision earlier this year to end the 21-year run of his Dayton band, Guided by Voices, with one final album and tour raised nationwide cries of "Someone tell me why."

Although Pollard has never landed a mainstream radio hit with one of his quirky, hook-replete compositions, he's a rock star to scores of music lovers whose tastes lean left of the dial. More than 600 fans crammed into the sold-out Southgate House in Newport for Friday's local stop of the Electrifying Conclusion tour.

But Pollard's career has always been more emblematic of individual excess than the worldly decadence embraced by Plant and his Led Zeppelin brethren.

The revolving membership of Pollard's backing band, and the hundreds of tracks generated for Guided by Voices and his solo and side projects, kept the audience guessing about which songs would make it into the set list and which of the band's alumni would turn up onstage. (Those who lent their licks to the proceedings included Tobin Sprout, who opened the show with his own band, and Greg Demos).

The other urgent speculation of the night was about how inebriated Pollard would get. Beer, which has always played a huge role in the band's ethos, often stole center stage. Pollard downed bottle after bottle, and didn't blink when audience members doused him with sprays from their beer cans.

As a performance, Guided by Voices' final local stint can only be described as erratic, with Pollard teetering between shambling drunkenness and piercing intensity. As a farewell party, however, the show exemplified the word that most aptly describes just about everything Pollard does: epic.

For much of the show, Pollard slurred his faux-British vocals and between-songs ramblings into unintelligibility, and his famous high kicks devolved into stumbling lurches across the stage. Mid-set, he offered a mea culpa to the audience: "I would like for you to forgive us for getting too (messed) up."

Redemption arrived when the band capped its two-hour set with an invigorating encore. The crowd exploded when the band kicked into "Cut-Out Witch," "Game of Pricks," and perhaps the most irrepressibly catchy song Pollard has written, "Teenage FBI."

For the band's last number, Pollard chose one of his most compelling clarion calls, "Watch Me Jumpstart." That song's simplest line rang the most true as indie rock's idiosyncratic icon bowed out on a gratifyingly triumphant note: "I can't pretend to be something I'm not."

E-mail chanifin@enquirer.com