America:In downtown Cleveland, on the shores of Lake Erie, a giant glass pyramid pumps out old hits all day long as a steady stream of middle-aged men files inside. This is the Rock and Roll Hall of Fame, the city's leading tourist attraction and a museum that documents the entire history of rock and roll - up until about 15 years ago.
Designed by I M Pei, who is also responsible for the pyramids at the Louvre in Paris, the museum was opened in 1995 to honour members of the Hall of Fame and to house artefacts from performers living, dead and somewhere in between.
"I didn't know a thing about rock and roll," Pei said after he won the commission, so Hall of Fame board members took him on trips to Memphis and New Orleans and to concerts in New York.
"We heard a lot of music and I finally got it: rock and roll is about energy," Pei said.
The atmosphere inside the museum is one of hushed reverence as visitors gaze at precious relics like the boxer shorts Marky Ramone wore in 1980, Otis Redding's cardigan from 1966, or Bono's Macphisto suit, all displayed behind old-fashioned museum glass.
When I visited this week, all the visitors were well over 40 and nearly all were men, although a heartless few had persuaded their wives to come along. As the men studied the hand-painted Madonna on the pick guard of Johnny Thunder's 1960 Gibson Les Paul Junior electric guitar, the women remained lost in their own thoughts.
When the husbands got to the Hohner pianet Ron Argent played on the Zombies' 1964 hit She's Not There, the wives looked as if they might asphyxiate from boredom. The men didn't care, not least because some of them had also taken along a male pal for company.
After the endless guitars, the costumes, the old 45s, the sheet music, the semi-literate personal letters, the concert posters and the album covers, it was time to climb the spiral ramp in the museum's spire. Along the walls are the names and the autographs of all those inducted into the Hall of Fame since 1986.
The first inductees included Chuck Berry, James Brown, Ray Charles, Sam Cooke, the Everly Brothers and Elvis Presley, some of whom were alive at the time.
Artists only become eligible to join the Hall of Fame 25 years after the release of their first recording and each year's inductees (usually five) are chosen by about 1,000 producers, music journalists, academics and other experts.
The choice of inductees usually attracts some criticism from fans who complain that their favourite performers have been overlooked yet again while some mediocrity is honoured.
Few nominations have been as controversial, however, as last year's decision to induct Grandmaster Flash and the Furious Five as the Hall of Fame's first hip-hop artists.
Few disputed Grandmaster Flash's distinction and most agreed that it was time the Hall of Fame began to recognise hip-hop as the most significant movement in popular music since the 1960s.
The problem was that the Dave Clark Five, a British band from the early 1960s, had received six more votes than Grandmaster Flash. Dave Clark Five fans complained that the vote was rigged and that the Hall of Fame was so eager to honour a rap artist that it used a technicality to exclude some votes that arrived a day late.
"We counted all the votes received by the deadline," Hall of Fame communications chief Todd Mesek told me wearily this week.
The Dave Clark Five have been chosen, along with Madonna, Leonard Cohen, John Mellencamp and The Ventures, to be this year's inductees at a ceremony on March 10th. Sadly, the honour has come too late for Dave Clark Five lead singer Mike Smith, who died of pneumonia on Tuesday at the age of 64.
Smith had been paralysed since 2003, when he suffered a spinal cord injury, and his agent, Margot Lewis, said the last five years of his life had been very difficult.
"He was extremely excited and honoured to have been inducted into the Rock and Roll Hall of Fame, and I am glad that he will be remembered as a Hall of Famer, because he was in so many ways," she said.
