Songfacts®:

• Musicians have been known to write songs about drugs but obfuscate the meanings so they'd get played on the radio (case in point: "Got To Get You Into My Life" by The Beatles). Patti Smith did the exact opposite on this song. She made it sound like a drug song so it would get rejected by radio, but it's really about pop music, which could also be addicting in its own way.
  
  Poppies are the source of opium, used to make heroin and other drugs. When Smith sings, "I wanna score," it sure seems obvious what she has in mind, but these poppies are the hit songs that get played over and over on the radio, like "Afternoon Delight" and "Disco Inferno."
  
  "It's a song against s--t on the radio, but I was disguising it as a drug song, since it seems to be more accepted to take drugs than to talk against the radio," Smith explained to New York Rocker. "I was disguisin' my anti-radio song as a habitual blues song."
• Smith was actually on the road to pop stardom when she released "Poppies" on her second album, Radio Ethiopia. Her debut album, Horses, got a lot of press and earned her a solid fan base. The songs aren't radio-friendly, but she certainly built a buzz. But instead of following up with something more suitable for the general listening audience, she released the very edgy Radio Ethiopia, with an abstruse 10-minute title track. Her only real radio hit came a few years later, when "Because The Night," written by Bruce Springsteen, went to #13 in America and made the charts in several other countries.
• The Wizard Of Oz was an influence on this song. In the movie, there's a scene where Dorothy and her companions start running through a poppy field but then start feeling funny and fall asleep.
• Smith wrote this song with her keyboard player, Richard Sohl. The album was produced by Jack Douglas, known for his work with Aerosmith.