Levin, a legendary figure in Indianapolis rock history as a promoter and manager, chose this past April 1 to unveil the grandest of all his schemes: the SoBro Town Hall at 4925 N. College Ave., combination artistic commune, meeting place, music hall, center for social unrest, not-for-profit consulting, rock museum and quite possibly biomedical engineering and defense (I wouldn’t be surprised).

“April Fool’s Day. It’s our holiday!” Levin exclaims, jester hat dangling on his head, just barely keeping his shock of white hair in check. “The weird, the freaks, the few, the twisted. It’s our national holiday. This is a great place for partying or meeting, for those of us who are not of the country club mindset.”

In the front room alone you’ll see a peace flag hanging on the wall, rock memorabilia of all kinds hanging everywhere and a cotton candy machine dispensing a concoction of Levin’s own invention: caffeinated cotton candy. Buzz Balls, he calls them.

“I was one of the first three guys to put up flyers in Broad Ripple, when there were no staples in the telephone poles,” he says proudly. “We watched the staples grow.”

One room is lined with jackets with a variety of rock logos on them. “Souvenirs, war memorials of campaigns long gone by,” he says. Not to mention all sorts of other stuff that he can conjure seemingly at will.

“What’s your favorite obsession?” he asks me. “What’s your hobby?”

Medieval stuff, I tell him, and he whips around a cabinet and out comes a collection of dozens of swords, crossbows, even a batarang. If the Legion of Doom ever comes knocking, he’ll be ready.

The whole mess has been assembled over four years from donations, wholesale, dumpsters, auctions, whatever. Much of the brickwork, scenery and construction has been donated by artists who were just happy to work on a place where the owner gave them carte blanche to do anything.

“Every time I wanted or needed something for this, I got it. It scared the hell out of me,” he says. “People just drop things off on the porch or the loading dock and don’t tell me. It’s just all come together as it’s SUPPOSED to. It’s weird.”

The whole setup is commercially zoned, too, which comes in handy. Back in the day, it was the original building for Steck Plumbing, in 1916. He’s got the nicest bathrooms of any art commune; some of them are still the Art Deco bathrooms Steck used as demonstration models.

The complex only looks small from the front, like a modest little building with a couple of offices. Once you’re inside it seemingly goes on forever, like a haunted house with countless passages. And once you get out back you’re only halfway there, venturing into the Tin House and its own dungeon compound.

The Tin House itself is a masterpiece of junkyard design, built from corrugated tin and soundproofed from within. You can hold a rock concert in there — and he does — and barely hear it outside. A punk band is screaming through their set, but in a weird way it’s like they’re not there. Just part of the scenery. It’s like wandering through a 1960s art film like Blow Up.

As Levin maneuvers through the crowd, he snakes up to Justin Allen of The Slurs, hiding in plain sight, markers a moustache on his face and then he’s gone, jokester to the last.

It’s the ultimate alternative outlet from the ultimate Indianapolis iconoclast. “Welcome back to rock and roll,” he says. “I’ve wanted to do this for a long time, but it wouldn’t happen, it shouldn’t happen. Now it’s time. When the right starts going really far, the left starts going far. It’s a pendulum. When the Moral Majority rears its ugly head, pressing their issues on to us …” He shakes his head wearily. “No go. I don’t even watch the news much anymore because it pisses me off.”

As we head out again, some guy is banging on the squeaky door to the Tin House, again and again. “Don’t be an asshole!” Levin calls out, quoting what seems to be his one rock-solid rule. “I keep the door that way so I know it if someone tries to get in at night.”

Incidentally, cell phones don’t work in the Tin House. At all. One can suppose that numerous other forms of communication and probably surveillance are equally blocked.

Justin Allen walks up right around then, face freshly cleansed of marker paint. “I love this man. I love this man more than the Earth. If I could walk on you, I’d destroy the Earth!” he says, and I think he means it, so keep this man away from the Death Star plans. “You snuck up on me when you put that moustache on! And I’m always watching my back!”

We maneuver through the labyrinthine back halls of the Tin House and emerge out back, right next to a truck that could probably serve as a decent getaway car. Clever. Every turn reveals another hallway, another enormous closet, another entire floor of stuff.

And this is before you take into account the giant underground room Levin discovered beneath his driveway — secret warehouse? Underground railroad? Dillinger’s old hidden casinos? He’s not sure, but once it’s opened that’s hundreds more square feet of space.

He always knows exactly where everything is, even as he shifts and moves half a dozen boxes to get to it. It’s a Chinese puzzle box, constantly shifting, constantly changing and only he knows its secrets.

Like Levin himself, a veritable museum of rock history, the vast majority of it uncatalogued. “See, here, an antique,” he says, as he tosses me a copy of the Great Mondo Gazette. “When you can’t get coverage for your band, you gotta do it for yourself.”

I flip through and notice many articles are by Dr. Mondo. “Is that you?”

“Among many other names.”

We plunge deeper into the womb of the house of secrets. He has a secret path to the upstairs, behind a sliding bookshelf (“You ARE Batman,” I marvel) and an even trickier ladder into the attic, right beside his autographed Johnny Cash poster.

“I live for one thing — this expression.” He makes a dumbfounded face. “The look of ‘Holy shit. Holy shit, you made me think. You kicked a thought into my head.’”

“Time and space just don’t work the same way around here,” Levin’s buddy Mark Herrick notes. Maybe it’s a reality distortion field generated by Levin himself. He is Merlin living backwards, Peter Pan never growing old, a portrait of counterculture in repose. This is a generation that was supposed to die out, grow up or sell out by now, and here he is still at it.

“Kids relate real well to Bill. It’s the parents who have all the trouble!” Herrick says.

“I finally grew up to be a dirty old man!” Levin says. “I’m the same pig I was when I was 14.”

Two daughters either live here with him or spend a lot of time here — I’m vague on the details. Jeanette and Lexy, 9 and 13 respectively. They have the same mania as their dad, combined with the self-assuredness and confidence of young girls. Naturally he’s outclassed.

“Jeanette! Quit hustling Uncle Paulie!” he yells at one point. She ignores him and goes on. I hope he checked his pockets afterwards.

In the crowd that night, the punkest-looking, scowlingest kids around are all the teen-age sons and daughters of Levin and his crew of longtime buddies. It’s this generation that he focuses a lot of his attention and interest on, getting them ready to be a warrior class carrying on the fight after he’s gone. Kids need history, he laments.

“These motherfuckers are walking down the street with purple mohawks and they think they’re the first ones! How many parents have taught their kids how to take a public bus? Or use a coin-operated phone?”

The Osbournes have nothing on this group, as a moment around midnight in the front room demonstrates. Someone’s arguing over whether a firework dubiously entitled The Wheel of Ultimate Destruction is legal in Indiana, and proposes to test this theory. Someone else is debating cheesecake and pizza and how one properly cuts it, and Levin is trying to distance himself from all of it. I look over at Lexy.

“Is it like this all the time, or just opening night?” I ask.

She rolls her eyes as only a 13-year-old vaguely frustrated with her terminally unhip dad can do. “All the time.”

Back in Levin’s day, guys would get a charm bracelet and make an ID tag with their name on it and give it to girls on a chain. He sealed his relationship with his current lady love, Allison Nelson, by giving her a chain she wears on her waist.

Some things never change.

He certainly hasn’t. He’s equal parts Ken Kesey, Willy Wonka and Jack Black in School of Rock, clinging to old ways and somehow making it work.

“Bill is the Barter King!” Mark Herrick says. “I don’t see him so much with dollar bills as I do when objects are changing places.”

By the end of the night, Levin is talking with two women about some kind of elaborate undertaking involving photography classes, strippers and nude modeling. I am somehow involved in this scheme, though I must confess the details are fuzzy and I hope it’s not indictable.

“How do you keep up with all this?” I ask.

“I just keep on going,” he says. “If I have to stop and think too hard about what I’m doing or how I’m doing it, I start to get very nervous. Because I have no idea how I do it myself.”