The Hall of Fame for rock just can’t get rollin’ : But backers of the Cleveland site refuse to sing the blues despite the six years of delays and problems.

The sign on the door says Rock ‘n’ Roll Hall of Fame and Museum, but don’t let that fool you. Beyond the door lies only a modest suite of offices. The walls are lined, it is true, with original album cover art and photographs of Jimi Hendrix, Roy Orbison and other rock luminaries.

But the really valuable stuff--Buddy Holly’s eyeglasses, Elvis Presley’s cape, Hendrix’s guitar--all are kept either in a locked room here or in bank vaults.

Even K. Michael Benz, the new Hall of Fame director, says he hasn’t seen the artifacts. Heaven knows when anybody else will catch a glimpse.

Six years after Cleveland was chosen to be the site of the Rock ‘n’ Roll Hall of Fame, problems and delays continue to plague the project. It was announced in March that groundbreaking--scheduled for this year--will be pushed back to 1993.

Cleveland, the self-proclaimed “Comeback City,” had counted on the I. M. Pei-designed rock Valhalla as certification of its emergence as a newly revitalized “destination location” for tourists. Now the question being asked around town is whether the edifice will ever be built.

“It’s making progress,” said Benz, a former executive with the Greater Cleveland Growth Assn. who took over after the previous director resigned recently. “I believe it’s going to get done or I wouldn’t have left a 22 1/2-year career and come over here to try to bring it from third base to home.”

The biggest challenge has been trying to raise funds during a recession, he said.

Promoters are appealing for funds to youth-oriented firms, but Benz admits potential sponsors are skeptical: “Nobody’s ever built a Rock ‘n’ Roll Hall of Fame. Our mission is to get them to believe that it’s really going to happen.”

The museum complex will include exhibits and archives for serious research as well as computerized listening booths, recorded oral histories and elaborate multimedia presentations that try to capture the excitement of rock music. It could bring an estimated 900,000 people to Cleveland annually.

The New York-based Rock ‘n’ Roll Hall of Fame Foundation has held annual ceremonies to induct rock luminaries into the unbuilt hall since 1986. Next year, for the first time, the ceremony will be held in Los Angeles. But even when the hall finally is built, the New York group has only promised to “consider” holding ceremonies in Cleveland.

Benz shrugs that off. “If not the induction ceremonies, you have an enshrinement ceremony,” he said. But suggest that Cleveland may be an out-of-the-way place for rock music figures based in New York and Los Angeles, and he grows defensive. “We’re a city of many Fortune 500 companies,” he said emphatically. “We have many international firms. . . . Cleveland is not off the beaten track at all. We’re an airline hub. It’s easy to get to Cleveland.”

The city won the right to build the hall in a national competition, largely because its promoters were so well organized and local fervor was so strong.

Cleveland based its claim to the museum on the popularization of the term “rock ‘n’ roll” here in the 1950s by successful record store owner Leo Mintz and legendary disc jockey Alan Freed, who used it on his radio broadcasts from the city in 1951.

While the museum has been successful at collecting memorabilia and artifacts, construction has been delayed twice because of funding hardships. Further slowing things down is the involvement of three separate government entities in the funding and planning process.

Members of the New York foundation had been in charge of seeking corporate sponsors until March. Now, amid rumors the New Yorkers are unenthusiastic about building in Cleveland, locals have taken over fund raising.

Of the $43.5 million already raised, all but $14 million was provided by City Hall, Cuyahoga County and the state of Ohio. The total cost of the museum, which now is expected to open in 1995 or early 1996, the city’s bicentennial, may reach $85 million.

Among those wondering if it ever will be built are the rock industry leaders who make up the board of the New York-based Hall of Fame Foundation.

“I’m sure they’re skeptical, just like the general public, because they don’t see it coming out of the ground yet,” Benz admitted. “They’re frustrated.”

Record executives live in an “instant world,” he said. “When they say to an artist: ‘Go do an album,’ they go do an album. Now they don’t understand why they say: ‘Go build a museum,’ and there’s no museum coming up.”