“They call me the Keith-iest Keith,” said Kevin Gleeson, 55, referring to his resemblance, both visually and musically, to the Rolling Stones guitarist Keith Richards.
Standing in the bathroom of his Astoria, Queens, apartment last weekend, Mr. Gleeson was really beginning to resemble Mr. Richards, as he applied makeup to achieve something of a wasted pallor.
He grabbed a pair of leopard-print spandex pants, a flowing shirt and a pink head scarf, and pulled on a pair of worn-out snakeskin boots that he said had logged more than 500 gigs with him as Mr. Richards over the years.
The gig this night was a barroom performance with the Stony Rollers, a local Stones tribute band. Mr. Gleeson has been performing the music of Keith Richards for more than 40 years — early on with his various blues and rock cover bands, and for the past 20 years with tribute bands like Beggars Banquet and Sticky Fingers.
Mr. Gleeson has a day job that might make the real Keith Richards choke on his dangling cigarette: He works for the New York Police Department.
During the week, he can be found at Police Headquarters in Lower Manhattan, wearing a sport jacket and tie and working as a graphic artist in the Management Analysis and Planning unit of Commissioner William J. Bratton’s office.
Mr. Gleeson designs banners and other materials for news conferences, high-level meetings and other uses.
Sometimes his rocker side clashes with the button-down demeanor of 1 Police Plaza, like the time he was unexpectedly called into the commissioner’s office while wearing a pair of pink pants with his long hair unbound from its usual ponytail.
Walking from floor to floor on Tuesday, he seemed to know everyone from the top chiefs to the building staff, and many of them asked about his coming shows.
Mr. Gleeson said he grew up in Woodside, Queens, in a strict Catholic family of “cops and nurses.” At holiday gatherings, off-duty weapons were placed on top of the refrigerator.
He began playing guitar when he was 12, after hearing the riffs in “Brown Sugar” on a neighbor’s turntable. He took lessons on a borrowed guitar at St. Sebastian’s, the local Catholic school, and learned how to play rock and blues from his neighbor Nicky Martin, leader of the band Street Punk, who let him apprentice.
But it was Mr. Richards who was his musical idol and father figure. He went to Rolling Stones concerts, bought all the records and studied the guitar parts to figure out Mr. Richards’s unique tunings.
He also followed the famous rocker’s decadent path into drinking and drugs for much of his teenage years and his 20s, until becoming clean and sober even before auditioning for his first tribute band, Beggars Banquet, in 1995.
To keep up appearances onstage, he would mix coffee and Pepsi in a glass so that it would foam up and resemble a pint of Guinness.
“I always get a kick out of being sober 28 years and playing the guy people call the most wasted guy on Earth,” he said. “But I consider it a rite of passage in order to play Keith properly. It’s hard to imitate the guy if you haven’t walked a mile in his shoes.”
When he joined Sticky Fingers in 2005, he said, “I became their 24th Keith,” and he toured the country and Europe, from bars to frat parties to concert arenas.
“I was a kid from Queens who knew three chords, traveling the world playing in front of 11,000 people in Europe,” Mr. Gleeson said, sitting next to his coffee table, where his civilian Police Department shield rested next to a pile of guitar picks and a recent issue of Spring 3100, the department’s long-running magazine, which included a photo of him performing shirtless.
“As far as I know, it’s the only bare-chested Keith in the N.Y.P.D.’s in-house magazine,” he said. On that night last weekend, Mr. Gleeson was, finally, with the assistance of his wife, Jen Haus, a psychotherapist, in full Richards regalia. He grabbed a 55-year-old amplifier and a “Sticky Fingers”-stenciled guitar case containing two Telecasters rigged with the five-string tunings that Mr. Richards uses.
He headed to Mickey Malone’s pub in Floral Park, just over the Queens border with Long Island, to join the Stony Rollers, who include two retired New York police officers: Joe Zogbie, also on guitar, and Ken Brown as Mick Jagger.
Mr. Gleeson said his life is less Keith-like now, but he is not ready to give up living like a Rolling Stone.
“I just really want to keep a foot in it,” he said before launching into those raunchy riffs on “Honky Tonk Woman” and rocking the bar.
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