After having most of his band walk out on him following a show in Phoenix last week, no one would have blamed The Fall [ tickets ]'s Mark E. Smith if he had decided to pull the plug on the band's US tour and flown straight home to England.

But when you're a legendary rock iconoclast with more than 30 years of ups and downs under your belt, you don't give up. You simply reload. Sunday night (5/14) in San Francisco, The Fall rose again.

The departed band members--guitarist Ben Pritchard, bassist Steve Trafford and drummer Spencer Birtwistle--left the tour amid a storm of controversy that came to a peak when Justin Williams of The Talk, the tour's initial support act, came onstage during The Fall's Phoenix show and tossed a banana peel at Smith, striking him in the head. Williams later claimed on his blog that the action was warranted by Smith's awful behavior throughout the tour, which included dumping a bottle of beer and an ashtray over the head of the band's tour bus driver.

Whatever the truth of the matter, with the three musicians gone from the fold, the future of the tour seemed to be in extreme peril. Somehow, some way, Smith managed to find three replacements, set them up with a few Fall LPs before their Tuesday night (5/9) debut in San Diego, and teach them how to play the songs on short notice.

Reports of the band's shows since the bust-up in Phoenix have been generally glowing, and Sunday night Smith brought his replacements to The Independent in San Francisco, where The Fall played a short but smart set to a large, enthusiastic crowd.

Concentrating on material from the band's two most recent studio albums, 2003's "Real New Fall LP" and last year's prophetically titled "Fall Heads Roll," The Fall led off with the chugging "Bo Demmick," which features a propulsive beat in the style of Bo Diddley. The energetic, muscular song set the tone for the rest of the crackling set, leading into "Pacifying Joint," a prime example of the "Fallbilly" the band has been pulling off for decades.

With wife and keyboardist Elena Poulou at his side, Smith looked well at home in front of the adoring crowd, leading his new recruits through the numbers with ease.

A rousing version of "Theme From Sparta F.C." brought the crowd surging forward to soak in the song's call-and-response explosiveness, with Poulou and new bassist Rob Barbato tacking an emphatic "Hey!" to the end of each chorus,

"Mountain Energei" then wove a mesmerizing spell, showcasing guitarist Tim Presley and drummer Orpheo McCord, as Smith related the song's amusing tale of being stuck in the endless loop of the credit process.

Equally impressive was "What About Us?", a nearly eight-minute story about a "rabbit from East Germany" who becomes depressed when he reads a newspaper article about infamous British mass-murderer Harold Shipman. The thrashing, anthemic piece exploits Smith's famous ability to lock his musicians in a nerve-rattling groove and keep them there indefinitely, with every repetition on the main riff building on the last to a crescendo that never really comes: it's the ride there that makes format work. Like a long road trip, you get to stare out the windows and soak up a lot of scenery while the classic Smith opus unfolds.

The short set (less than an hour) concluded with the brilliant "Blindness," 10 minutes of deep bass groove and scattershot synth play, and one of the meatiest hooks you're likely to hear this or any other year. The song unfolds slowly, deliberately drawing the listener into its labyrinth madness, with Smith emoting such inscrutables as "The poster was Orwellian in its stupidity," and "I was only on one leg!"

More than anything, the set proved once again Smith's remarkable ability to adapt and recover from adversity. Though the new trio of musicians who appeared Sunday night are not likely to last with the band beyond the current US tour, one gets the feeling that Smith will simply fly home, reach into his giant magician's hat, and pull out another prize-winning rabbit.