The house show is the sort of head-smacking revelation I should have figured out a long time ago. The Oz-like mystique of a concert venue disappears when you realize that beneath the service charges, mood lighting, and fifty foot stacks, a concert venue is just a 120 volt plug and four walls. Guess what, your apartment or house comes equipped with both, and for some performers, that plug is superfluous.

In this imploding economy, ironically triggered by houses, I am sure someone in the country has offered that inexpensive house shows are an economically driven phenomenon. But house shows are not the effect of a starved financial economy – rather a starved musical economy. The search for musical authenticity outside the music industry is of course not new. But it is new to me and it feels brand new to Dallas. Perhaps it is especially so for Dallasites born or arriving too late to take in Deep Ellum’s prime.

I took to the house show model immediately, even hosting a few of my own. The advantages are obvious: intimacy, palpability, sincere camaraderie. But the weekend of July 17, veteran house show organizers hit upon a new idea, or new to me: a progressive house show, where the audience would move with the performance – from domicile to domicile – a hipster army with their Chuck Taylors and bicycles marching the Dallas streets.

From the moment I heard about the show, I made plans to rent a tandem bike with my girlfriend. The show was to take place at four houses - later reduced to three - each within a mile of each other. I felt the novelty of the transport matched that of the event.

Schlepping a backpack stuffed with cans of Shiner and a bike lamp we would never use, we set out for the first house, a mere two and a half miles from my apartment. I donned gym shorts and my Nowitzki jersey, as determined to remain comfortable as I was to announce my inflexible fanaticism.

We arrived at the first house early enough to survey the rooms of books and vintage stereo equipment. Standing among stacks of Gautier paperbacks atop old cassette players, we observed throughout that the house occupants were all well read, or, like me, stock their bookshelves to appear well read. Jammed in the front room were great tubular scaffolds buttressing keyboards and synthesizers.

The first band was Survive, an Austin quartet that remains tethered to Dallas by a lone member. Resembling a dressed-down Kraftwerk, they stood poker-faced behind the digital multiplex I noticed earlier, lurching forward in time with the thick bass tones. Survive plays synthy instrumental music whose appeal, I suggested that night, is rooted in our generation’s awareness of 80s cinema. A good percentage of the songs sounded like Axel Foley investigating. Consistent with my theory, the sound felt snug around my ears, I being a child of, as someone recently observed, “the whole 80s.”

The second house was a near-shotgun construction with the band set up in the second room from the front. The bassist stood unintentional guard over the refrigerator. If you wanted your tall boy, you had to go through the rhythm section. The group, Loose Lips Sink Ships, was from Chicago, centrally anchored by a percussive Dr. Frankenstein, xylophone on his lap, forearms cartoonishly blurred with speed. The crowd, at the band’s behest, moved in, snugged up to the bass drum. I was personally close enough to adjust one guitarist’s tuning if I took the fancy. The bookcase behind the band, also impressively stocked, teetered precariously as Loose Lips shook the walls.

Another instrumental performer, Loose Lips rocked with the kind of abstract, angular ferocity I begrudgingly attributed to jazz influence. I hate jazz, but I loved that band. When they finished their final ten minute jam, I asked the guitarist what possessed them to add a presumably non-paying house show in Dallas to their two week tour schedule. “Evan [Horn] set it up,” he said, “We’ve been playing DIY shows the whole way.”

By the time we left the second house, we had really mastered the tandem bike and we now drew praise from the crowd gathered on the porch. We were certain by now that we could master the Alps leg of the Tour de France and began pedaling with exactly that measure of enthusiasm, only to realize the next house was a block and a half away. I met the bassist from Loose Lips inside shortly thereafter. He pointed at my Dirk jersey and back at his Chicago Bulls t-shirt. “Rivals,” he suggested with authority. “Hardly,” I retorted. I was happy to have my homerism acknowledged and, furthermore, to have responded in turn like a complete homer.

Sydney Confirm began their set shortly after the drummer finished sharing his potato chips with the audience. They played the kind of shimmy-able rock that I begrudgingly attributed to disco influence. Turns out there are several subgenres represented in my musical diet that I find reprehensible out of context. I would have much more to report about the infectious mania of Sydney Confirm were it not for events that followed.

While in the bathroom, I noticed the barely begun music had ended abruptly. I walked back to the living room to notice the crowd scurrying out the front door while the swirling blue-red lights of five - yes, five - police cars shone through the front windows. With no emergency room visitors to harass, ex-presidents to protect, or fake cocaine to plant, the Dallas Police apparently felt they could spare a half dozen officers to break up a house show. The Officers, under the impression they were dealing with enemy combatants, tried to pick fights with several mousy hipsters as they gathered up their man-bags and iPods.

I want to avoid any air of conspiracy theory here. The civil laws were not deliberately drafted to speak the words I am about to put in their mouths. But, indirectly, this is the unavoidable message from your governors: you will see and hear music where we say you can, when we say you can, in the spaces we have zoned, drinking the beverages we have approved. Ultimately, house shows are a threat to the civil government. They cannot be taxed or regulated. Localized music exists without the blessing or support of civil authority. Typically, what government cannot regulate, it despises. Their umbrage is justified; it cannot be regulated. In a city of one and a quarter million, there are a lot of 120 volt plugs and domestic square feet, a fair enough portion belonging to music fans who crave authenticity. The movement eludes the empire simply by those fans’ willingness to open their doors. The question is when will you open yours?