[Billy] Joel was on hand yesterday for the announcement of the [Soho] annex [to Cleveland’s Rock and Roll Hall of Fame], along with Sony BMG’s chief creative officer Clive Davis and Mayor Michael Bloomberg, but he couldn’t hand over the piece from the final Shea Stadium concerts that the museum had asked him to donate. “I was supposed to be giving the jersey that I was given at Shea Stadium during the shows, but actually that jersey is in a road case on its way to Hong Kong,” Joel said. “So this morning, I ran around my house looking for tchotchkes that I could give and I was pulling stuff off the walls.”

Museum organizers are excited about the new exhibit. “We hear that this pink, shell-shaped glass ashtray was given to Joel by Elton John, and we are thrilled to have these leather coasters which, as you can see, are definitely uptown.”

Other items rumored to be in the exhibit are a large collection of ceramic thimbles, each bearing the coat of arms of a different city visited by Joel during his Storm Front and USSR tours, and a set of Russian nesting dolls painted with the likenesses of the Beatles.  Joel told museum staff that he’s “fairly sure” that “at least one or two” of several decorative keychains he donated were the ones that had held the keys of the cars he crashed in 2002, 2003, and 2004.

But the item curator Simon Littlewood calls “the crown jewel of the collection” is an empty matchbox emblazoned with the album art for ‘We Didn’t Start the Fire.’ Scrawled across the design, in Joel’s writing, are the words “just kidding - we totally did.”

Tags: entertainment, music, we didn't start the fire, nesting russian dolls, tchotchkes, shea stadium, rock and roll hall of fame, billy joel