OF THE MANY musical blessings that abounded in San Francisco's storied Mission District in the near-mythic 1990s, one of the most uniquely thrilling was Rube Waddell, a curious junkyard trio with a habit of playing monthly gigs outside the old Leeds shoe store on Mission at 22nd Street. Despite the racket and the late hour of their performances, the Rubes never had any problem with the gendarmes, invariably attracting a motley audience of passersby and camp followers.

Leeds has since been replaced by a Sketchers, and the Rubes have had no shortage of gigs on actual stages around town, playing under their own name and in the Victorian guise of the yarn-spinning Armchair Geographers. But "Live at Leeds" remains a periodic pleasure for San Franciscans in the know – or at least those who happen to be passing by when the busking begins.

Such was the case on a recent Saturday night, when I was alerted by an e-mail to imminent shenanigans. Arriving on the scene with about 10 minutes to spare, we found the crowd sparse and the band still setting up gear. We opted for a stroll to the nearest corner store for some brown-bag beverages, and on returning, properly fortified, we discovered the band was in full swing, with the scattering of bystanders swelled into a seething mass of rough, unshaven fellows and bawdy young ladies.

At the center of it all were the Rubes, a curious agglomeration of four musicians, looking for all the world like an itinerant medicine show. There were straw hats and checkered vests, knickers, and watches on fobs. They seemed a rather sporting lot, despite their decidedly shifty demeanor and slippery cant, and their musicianship was, in fact, outstanding, if a bit archaic. They're the sort of folks you instantly take a liking to, although you'd best not leave them in your kitchen unattended.

Rube Waddell take their name from the legendary southpaw pitcher for Coach Connie Mack's fin de siècle Philadelphia Athletics. He was a bit of a wild dog, running off the field to chase fire engines in the middle of a game, disappearing during a midseason drinking binge and turning up as a bartender or an alligator wrestler in the swampy South, giving his money away to the needy, and taking poor care of his own remarkable self. The original Rube died young and penniless, but he left behind a rich cultural legacy, one that these San Francisco anachronists have gleefully plundered.

But back to the street corner, where the audience erupted into cheers and applause, shuffling around the besmirched pavement with a knee-bending, elbow-pumping sort of barroom boogie-woogie. I can confirm that the boys in the band – Mahatma Boom Boom, Reverend Wupass, Captain Legit, and Max A. Million – live up to their boast of being "strong, healthy young men with a realistic bent and an entirely American fascination with all things eschatological." Indeed, the Rubes' songbook is firmly grounded in honest matters of flesh and spirit – from their rousing ballads of shameless lust ("Jezebel," a song of sweeping feminine drama and desire, its skirts leeringly chased by a randy and wandering Mexicali trumpet) and apocalyptic terror ("Millenarian Blues," a slide guitar-woodblock-sousaphone romp with more fun than a box of rattlesnakes at a Pentecostal tent revival) to white-knuckle epics of indomitable masculine endurance ("Mawson's Will," a horrifying – and true! – tale of skin-peeling, liver-eating Antarctic survival underwent by the fated Australian explorer Douglas Mawson).

Perhaps it was the accordion, perhaps it was the scent of the evening, perhaps it was the cheap beer, but my memory grows spotty at this point. I recall stuffing cash into a porkpie hat, and audience members reading aloud dire fortunes extracted from the head of a bull. There were glimpses of hollering passengers leaning out the windows of passing busses and cars of all sorts – cabs, sedans, pickups – pausing midtraffic for a listen. At one point, an ambulance raced by, sirens wailing, and Captain Legit perked up, eyes sparkling. But the crowd was gathered around too densely for him to break through and give chase – this time. For all the rough-laddie shtick, there's real artistry going on with the Rubes. They play with the best – the first time I heard the hauntingly beautiful music of San Francisco phenom Jolie Holland was when she opened a "Live at Leeds" gig – and their antiquarian cultural literacy is genuine. Close the evening out with a foot-stomping, harmonica-driven rendering of Beethoven's "Ode to Joy," and you have a true hometown hoedown like no other. (Josh Wilson)