Released at the start of Andy Williams' ninth and (as it turned out) final season as an NBC television host, The Andy Williams Show LP was not a soundtrack recording from the TV series, and it was not really a live album, although it gets categorized as such.

What appears to be the case is that Columbia Records took a group of Williams' studio recordings, most of them made during the summer of 1970 and consisting of his versions of recent soft rock hits, and added a lot of canned applause along with some of the kind of musical interludes used to usher numbers on and off on the show, including bits of its "Moon River" theme music at the start and the finish.

The tracks themselves were pleasant enough.

Williams essayed the Carpenters' "(They Long to Be) Close to You," Michael Nesmith's "Joanne," the Association's 1967 hit "Never My Love," Bread's "Make It With You," Simon & Garfunkel's "El Condor Pasa (If I Could)," Anne Murray's "Snowbird," and Peter, Paul & Mary's "Leaving on a Jet Plane," along with the theme from the movie The Happy Ending, "What Are You Doing the Rest of Your Life." Columbia also dredged up a couple of tracks recorded back in 1968, "Spanish Harlem," the 1961 Ben E.

King hit, and "Hello, Young Lovers" from The King and I; they didn't really fit with the rest, but Williams sang them well.

Except that there wasn't quite enough of it, there was nothing wrong with the material; what was wrong was all that irritating applause, so obviously dubbed in (it even faded in and out).

Williams' fans responded to the shoddiness of the project, and it suffered relatively mediocre sales.

Given that Williams' popularity was starting to fade anyway, the album was a real blunder.