I suppose my problem with Can is that my introduction was via the Cannibalism compilation which was all killer, so when I eventually picked up the original albums some of the (filler) tracks were a wee a bit lacking
I had a similar thing with Doors albums, having heard two different single-LP compilations of best bits, and then the double album Weird Scenes Inside the Gold Mine, long long before I ever heard an original Doors album all the way through. In fact I only heard the debut or Strange Days when the CDs came out around 1990 - so that's like a decade gap. So the incredible impact the debut had on people when it came out in 1967 was largely lost - the famous bits were overfamiliar, the less famous bits seemed a bit slight - they weren't carried along by the excitement of the high points as must have been the case when heard in historical real-time.
It's also been the same with the Beatles and the Stones, having listened endlessly to the two 'staring down the EMI stairwell' double comps of early Beatles and 66 to end-of, and listened to Rolled Gold, the singles + odd album highpoint comp, with the Stones. I don't think any Beatles album has quite made sense to me as an album-album as a consequence. E.g. the sequencing of Revolver (this would be another thread - album sequencing - ones that are sublime, righteous, inevitable, no other way it could be - and ones that don't make any sense, perhaps how could they ever, given the motley constituents and diversity)
Now I think about it, I had Bowie's Changes for years before ever hearing a full-album with the one exception of Scary Monsters, taped off a friend.
Hearing things out of sequence also has funny effects - Station to Station doesn't sound impressive to me because I had heard Low many years before - so the advance that listeners in 1976 heard, the sense of going somewhere, what will he do next - I had already heard "next", Station felt insta-superceded. (Objectively as I can be I do think it's overrated as a record - it would fit this thread perfectly in fact)
I did hear the Stooges in more or less the right order and consequently Raw Power, great songs and performances notwithstanding, is vitiated by the Bowie mix which feels over-separated and puny c.f. Funhouse's thick marauding murk
Must be even more scrambled for your streaming-era kids - history's all a jumble, tracks spilling out willy-nilly, out of sequence, decontextualized. I find this with the students I'm teaching - where a song sits in an artist's arc, and where it sits in History, is a/ rarely known to them b/ utterly irrelevant to them. Perhaps that's a better way of listening.
