Elvis Presley’s drummer set the beat that rock’n’roll continues to follow

DJ Fontana, who has died aged 87, played drums for Elvis Presley and accomplished more with a snare drum, cymbal and sticks than The Who’s Keith Moon did with a 20-piece kit.

With snaps, thumps and pows that six decades later are a standard foundation of pop music, he helped define the rhythmic patterns of rock’n’roll. Starting in the mid-1950s, the influential drummer for Elvis Presley played on hits including Jailhouse Rock, All Shook Up and Viva Las Vegas.

Fontana had a style that blended measures of restraint with explosive moments of energy. The snare rolls that divide each verse of Hound Dog, for example, hit like bullets into a slingshot, pushing momentum and then snapping back. Conversely, on

Love, Fontana delicately taps a cymbal with a brush, keeping perfect time like the second hand on a vintage Timex.

Through his decade with Presley, Fontana set to tape rhythms that echo in the work of some of music’s most familiar drummers, including the Rolling Stones’ Charlie Watts, The Beatles’ Ringo Starr, White Stripes’ Meg White, Max Weinberg of Bruce Springsteen’s E Street Band, and Stan Lynch, formerly of Tom Petty and the Heartbreakers.

Lynch wrote in an online essay: ‘‘When you hear DJ Fontana playing his drums you are hearing a kid from Shreveport [Louisiana] tell you what he thinks music should sound like. Rock’n’roll had a clean slate. There were no drum parts written for him on those Elvis records. He dictated the groove and made you feel it. There is no-one on this earth that can make music move the way he did. He set the standard.’’

That Fontana landed on stage as part of Presley’s backing band was circumstantial. His main gig when he met Presley and bandmates Scotty Moore and Bill Black in 1954 was drumming for the radio show the

Louisiana Hayride. At the time, drummers were a luxury that only successful western swing bands could afford.

Moore and Black, then known as the Blue Moon Boys, had been playing a blend of blues, pop and country that was unique at the time, but it was missing something crucial. ‘‘Elvis and Scotty and Bill were making good music, but it wasn’t rock’n’roll until DJ put the backbeat into it,’’ The Band’s drummer Levon Helm told the Associated Press in 2004.

Fontana recalled in a 2001 interview that while at the Hayride, Presley asked him to ‘‘help us out a little bit’’. They went back to the dressing room to rehearse.

Once Fontana listened to what they were doing, his reflex was to reduce his role. ‘‘The sound they were getting was so good that I said, ‘Why should I assemble it up and bang it up?’ ’’ Instead, he decided to stay out of their way. ‘‘They were the stars. Let them do what they’re going to do, and not clutter up the rhythm. Play it straight ahead and no tricks. No tom-toms. No cymbals. And I guess they liked it.’’

Dominic Joseph Fontana was born in Shreveport, Louisiana. He began playing drums as a teen in his high school marching band, and would jam with his cousin while listening to big-band recordings. By his early 20s he performed at strip joints and spent enough time around the Hayride that he was hired fulltime, although at first he was asked to play behind a curtain because country audiences scorned drums.

He became a permanent member of Presley’s group in 1955, working with him through much of the 1960s. ‘‘Elvis would always want to go back and talk about the early days when there were four of us in a car, me, Scotty, Bill and himself,’’ Fontana once told the fan site Elvis Australia.

‘‘He told me one day, he said, ‘You know, I wish I wasn’t Elvis.’ And that struck me as funny – even back then. You know he kinda wanted to get away for a while.

‘‘I think he should have retired for about seven or eight years, and then come back, you know. And then he might still be with us.’’

Fontana’s style was the opposite of the competitive, innovative ball-hogs of future decades such as Moon, Rush’s Neil Peart and the Police’s Stewart Copeland. He understood his role to be that of a propellant gear in a musical engine.

Which isn’t to say he wasn’t inventive. During the session for Don’t Be Cruel, Fontana was trying to find something to add a jolt to the song. As told in writer Peter Guralnick’s Presley biography Last Train to Memphis ,it took 28 takes to get the song right, and somewhere along the way Fontana tapped a new percussion instrument: ‘‘[He] laid Elvis’ leather-covered guitar across his lap and played the back of it with a mallet, to get an additional snare effect.’’

That mallet thump is pumping out of speakers somewhere in the world as you read this, ensuring that Fontana’s beat will go on for years to come. –