Cleveland's Rock'n'Roll Hall of Fame by Simon Heptinstall

Little Richard and Yoko Ono performed the official ribbon-cutting ceremony. The seven-hour opening celebration concert included Bob Dylan, Bruce Springsteen, Chuck Berry and James Brown. The event was watched by 14 million American TV viewers. This was clearly not an ordinary museum.

The Rock and Roll Hall of Fame in Cleveland, Ohio, USA, opened 14 years ago claiming to be the most important shrine to rock music in the world. Since then virtually everyone you’ve heard of from the field of pop and rock has been "inducted" to the Rock and Roll Hall of Fame in Hollywood-style back-slapping ceremonies. At the time of writing Jeff Beck, Metallica and Bobby Womack were joining the list.

The "Rock Hall" – as it's known in the US – has become an almost reverential shrine for any American music-lovers. But for British music-lovers, is the Rock Hall worth the pilgrimage?

I set off to discover if the Hall is really "the world's definitive source for the preservation, interpretation and celebration of the history of rock and roll"? Or is it a typically American, over-commercialised collection of meaningless junk?

The first problem is getting to Cleveland, which is surely the world's least likely "rock capital", as it now calls itself. Cleveland has roughly the same image in America as the Cleveland in UK does – a decaying industrial zone somewhere up north where all they do is drink beer and watch sport.

The city's official guide book is reduced to boasting that this is where the gas mask and windscreen wipers were invented. The rest of America jokes about Cleveland as the city where the river once caught fire (because of pollution) and the mayor's hair caught fire (an unfortunate accident with a blow-torch on nationwide TV).

It has never been a tourist destination so there are no direct flights from Britain. I flew to New York and switched to a cramped and noisy propeller aircraft for two hours.

The Rock Hall itself is a dramatic structure: a 165-feet high aluminium tower and a huge glass pyramid overhanging Lake Erie designed by Ieoh Pei, who also designed the glass pyramid at the Louvre in Paris. There are huge coloured ‘statues’ of guitars adorning the piazza outside.

Inside, it's as commercialised as I'd feared. How many museums are proud to be "officially sponsored" by Pepsi, Radio Shack and HMV?

Tickets are $22 (around £15) and one of the biggest rooms is taken up by an expensive HMV record and souvenir shop where sweatshirts cost $50 (£35). Shops in town sell similar merchandise at half the price.

There are five floors of exhibits, video screens, film theatres and costumes covering everything from the early impoverished blues guitarists to today's punk and rap.

Some were fascinating. I loved the relics of rock music's most ridiculous excesses, like Alice Cooper's guillotine for mock beheadings, Madonna's famous pointy bosom costume and Janis Joplin's psychedelically painted Porsche. The Beatles' original handwritten lyrics to Lucy in the Sky with Diamonds are rather touching and I nodded with total admiration to see that they could spell 'kaleidoscope' correctly.

Most British visitors will however find that our contribution to history of rock is undervalued by the Americans. For example, the Beatles get a display cabinet equal in size to the Everley Brothers. ZZ Top and The Allman Brothers get more space than U2 or Queen.

Some displays, like the gallery of black and white photographs of stars, are clearly space fillers. Others fell into the 'train-spotters only' category.

Several times I wondered why I had travelled halfway round the world to gaze at a huge collection of autographed drumsticks, a guitar once smashed up by Pete Townsend and Michael Jackson's glove... all seriously displayed and labelled as if they were in the British Museum.

The mannequins modelling the stars' costumes, like Elvis's leather suit or the Beatles' Sergeant Pepper outfits, are laughably poor. Forget Madame Toussauds, these dummies are more reminiscent of the window of my local Top Shop.

Despite the shortcomings, the Rock Hall is extremely popular. There were long queues for the cafes, main exhibits and films. The architect, Ieoh Pei, says he planned for up to 1000 visitors at time. On the Saturday I was there, more than five times that number were let in before the "full" signs went up.

There are interactive screens that are like elaborate jukeboxes with headphones but the wait to use these were long. Once I reached them I heard to a collection of mainly American oldies and wondered why I'd bothered.

There's so many exhibits, however, there's bound to be something about one of your favourites – whether it's Roy Orbison's glasses, Bob Marley's dreadlocks or Elvis Presley's leather jacket.

My favourite was John Lennon's school report in which one teacher had scrawled: "Rather a clown in class but could do well". I'm sure John Lennon's favourite part of the museum would have been the section dedicated to those who tried to ban, censor or burn rock records.

There's even a TV clip of a woman claiming her houseplants were being killed by rock and roll.

In big letters across the wall is a quote from the former head of the FBI, J. Edgar Hoover, saying: "Rock and roll is repulsive to right thinking people."

How times have changed... for nowadays the Rock Hall is packed with a most mixed crowd, from well-dressed families to teenage punks with pierced noses. Everyone seemed to mingle politely. The only ones who didn't seem engrossed were the toddlers. To them, a display cabinet of sixties memorabilia must look like some funny coloured 30-year-old clothes ripe for a jumble sale.

Yet away from the Rock Hall, Cleveland does have enough attractions to make it worth a couple of days' stop-off on a tour of the Great Lakes.

The leafy University Circle district houses a sensational art gallery, several conventional museums and Severance Hall – home of highly-rated Cleveland Orchestra.

In between its shiny skyscrapers and glitzy shopping malls, the highlight of the Downtown area is a 19th-century arcade, interestingly called 'The Arcade'.

Clevelanders boast that this elegant five-storey marble, brass and wrought iron relic is the world's first shopping precinct. It's still a great place to sit outside the cafes on the balconies under the vaulted glass roof.

Even restored dockside buildings on the banks of the Cuyahoga River are worth visiting now the industries have gone. The restored warehouses and workshops are a hot-bed of lively bars, clubs and restaurants called The Flats.

Today there are some pretty average bar-room rock bands playing down there but once Cleveland was an important centre of black American music.

In fact, the Rock Hall was sited in Cleveland because of the city's music history. Local DJ Alan Freed first coined the phrase "rock and roll" in 1952, held the first ever R&R dance in the city (starring The Dominoes) and was among the first white DJs to champion black music.

Freed was later denounced for allowing commercialism to influence which records he played on radio. If Freed could see the rampant commercialism of the monument to rock and roll in his hometown, he'd rotate rapidly in his grave... at about 45 rpm, I'd expect.