When the ex-addicted musician plays in a detox center

BarcelonaAfter almost half a life of addictions, the Argentine musician Maximiliano Calvo He entered a detox clinic. Music, rock and roll, touring, the nightlife, and bad company led him to drugs. He also suffered from a "low self-esteem," which, he explains, he tried to cover up with an "exaggerated ego" to hide his feeling of being "the smallest man in the world." From his first line at 17 until now, at 32, he made a name for himself on the music scene as the opening act for Arcade Fire, Fito Páez, and Roberto Carlos, and, settled in Madrid, accompanying Jorge Drexter. "Outside, I lived with an increasingly louder volume, while inside there was a little voice, my monsters, and I saw myself as a failure," he recalls a few minutes before starting perhaps the most intimate and atypical tour he could have imagined during those years of excess.

Calvo has come to Barcelona as part of the concert tour he is doing through detox clinics and therapy centers, the same one he stepped on after hitting rock bottom during the Latin Grammy ceremony that took place in Seville in 2023. There he says he displayed his repertoire rock and roller and spent "a week doing everything wrong, like the world in reverse," to the point that he saw his musical career "tremble."

In December 2023, he entered a clinic, but confesses that he thought it would be a short therapy, a pim-pam "to calm" things down, and then we'll go back to it. He says that, deep down, it's the thought that crosses most addicts' minds: resetting the score to zero to go back "to getting high and drinking" and with the naivety that afterward, "nothing will happen." The three months were a regime of isolation and distancing himself from all the stimuli that might invite him to get high: no tobacco, no music, no movies, not even, at first, he had contact with the pile of books he brought or with the photos of his dog. "The most difficult thing was realizing that you are sick and that you are for life," he reflects minutes before the concert at the Mental Health Forum, a specialized addiction center in Barcelona.

15 months net

The musician performs songs he composed after leaving the clinic at these concerts across the state. He's been "clean" for a year and a half, but admits he's "just a sip of beer away from sitting in the same place again." There are no former drug addicts because they'll have to remain vigilant their whole lives. I can also save myself., Feng shui, Bad company... are some of the pieces with which the musician says he has "redeemed" himself because they speak "of recovery" after therapy. "I speak to the monster that is now smaller," he affirms, and assures that without the toxicity of drugs he is finally "the creative person I wanted to be."

"Drugs don't fill you up, they give you a shitty high," he recounts. "I haven't lied, manipulated, or hidden anything for a year and a half," he continues, and says that his life is full of routines, exercise, and a "self-care law" that requires not drinking in his presence. Outside, in the room where a stage has been improvised, around thirty patients are waiting for the concert to begin. Is Maxi the future, and are they looking at their past? "I don't feel that way, I don't want to establish a standard, it's a very horizontal act and I must say that it didn't help me to feel more than anyone else," he answers, and states that he is often "afraid" and feels "like a failure", but he quickly overcomes it: "It's the monster that I have to treat with affection.