Life’s wide open for LC graduate

When Christopher Douthitt gives his address Tuesday as valedictorian of Princeton University’s graduating class, there’ll be an echo from four years ago in Spokane.

That’s when Douthitt first was a valedictorian – at Lewis and Clark High School. He gave a speech that he remembers as “very grave and self-important,” with lots of literary flourishes and references to fleeting youth. He plans to lampoon it a bit this time around.

“Part of this is kind of making fun of my high school speech,” he said.

But only part, of course. When he takes the stage at one of the country’s most prestigious universities, he also plans to talk about the wide-open future that faces the graduates – something that’s particularly fitting for Douthitt, who intends to take his Ivy League degree, move to Chicago and pursue a career in rock ‘n’ roll.

The Spokane native is one of two students will who speak at commencement. At a graduation event the day before, the keynote speaker will be former President Clinton.

Douthitt is graduating with a degree in music that he hopes to apply directly to a career in rock – something he’s been working toward since he was a kid in Spokane forming bands like the Sapphire Bullets of Love and The Black Hand. He began playing guitar in sixth grade, and not long after began playing with others, he said.

He and two friends from LC – Blake Walker and Jared Turner – played in several of the lineups, and they now make up the Lazy Pheromones, along with Douthitt’s brother Robby. Walker attends Northwestern University near Chicago, and Douthitt is heading there to collaborate on music for the band.

Douthitt says his parents, Robert and Dianne Douthitt, support his decision to pursue music and aren’t after him to get a “real job.”

“As long as I have health insurance,” he said. “It’s more like, ‘Make sure you can pay for your broken leg.’ “

During his time at Princeton, he studied music composition and worked on a senior thesis project that saw him paired with Pulitzer Prize-winning poet Paul Muldoon to work on the lyrics of three songs he wrote, arranged and performed.

Douthitt said Muldoon was a taskmaster, asking for repeated rewrites. He’d bring in pages of lyrics; Muldoon would identify a single line he liked and say, “Throw the rest away.”

Muldoon himself said, in a Princeton news release about Douthitt, “It was a pleasure for me to work with Chris, though I’m not sure it was always a pleasure for him.”

But Douthitt said it was a thrill to work with Muldoon. “He’s one of the great poets,” he said. Access to that kind of faculty, Douthitt said, is among the key advantages to studying at Princeton, along with the support to pursue individual interests – such as rock music in a largely classical music environment.

“The whole thing about Princeton that’s been so great is I’ve been able to find a place to do what I was most interested in anyway,” he said.

Another thing he liked about Princeton was its no-loan financial aid policy, which provides grants and other support rather than directing students largely toward borrowing, as most schools now do. He won scholarships and prizes there, including one that provides $32,000 for graduate studies – something he may pursue in the future.

He said he didn’t know he was up for the valedictorian honor, which is decided by a faculty committee.

“I wasn’t expecting it at all,” he said. “It was a huge surprise for me.”