When you close your eyes and imagine a record store in San Diego, COW Records is exactly what you imagine. A small shop mere yards away from the beach, its glass windows displaying all manner of colored pressings. Records, CDs, and posters covering every wall and even the ceiling. Punk music is playing over the speakers while you browse the narrow aisles. There are no frills, no house plants, no LED lights, and no judgment.
What to Expect
COW Records in Ocean Beach is one of just a handful of record stores throughout San Diego’s metro area. I’m a homebody at heart, but even I can understand why a city this big has so few record stores. If I lived here, I probably wouldn’t be spending too much time inside either. Even as the weather in the PNW was turning grey and cold and wet, San Diego seemed unaware of the supposed changing of the seasons. Warm and sunny but slightly cooler than Yucca Valley.
The music culture of Southern California is more of the alive and in-person variety. It was this live music culture that led to so many of my favorite artists coming out of the punk scenes of SOCAL. The Offspring, Bad Religion, the Descendents, Social Distortion, Suicidal Tendencies, the list goes on. If anything, this makes great shops like COW Records all the more important, especially when they’re in a neighborhood with as much personality as Ocean Beach.
If you ask people who know San Diego about Ocean Beach, you’ll likely get a response that amounts to; Yeah, it’s fine, but there are better neighborhoods. Sure, this is true in some ways. There are better beaches in Encinitas and Coronado. La Jolla and Solana Beach in North County probably have better shopping and restaurants. Numerous neighborhoods are more family-friendly. So what exactly is so special about Ocean Beach?
I think every major city has one to two neighborhoods that feel more like “real” neighborhoods. Ocean Beach is the neighborhood for me in San Diego. Sure, there’s still plenty of tourists and shops selling t-shirts and snow globes and airplane liquor bottles, but there’s still plenty of grit to Ocean Beach. You walk around Ocean Beach on a Friday night, and it feels just a little more wild than any of the other beach promenades in San Diego. The parking lot right by the surfing-only part of the beach is filled with people blasting music and smoking weed on open tailgates. Low-stakes drug deals and some light underage drinking are commonplace. There aren’t families eating ice cream cones on benches (although An’s Electronic Repair Shop is worth a stop) or couples drinking wine and eating cheese on blankets. Instead, there are people skateboarding and passing bottles in a circle. Guys are freestyle rapping and mixing beats for dollar bills, groups of young and rowdy hooligans making friends with transients by offering cigs. Basically, all the things I would’ve been up to on a Friday night in my late teens.
Selection at COW Records
COW Records isn’t just a cool place to take pics for your Instagram. The selection here is definitely in the A-tier; worth a stop for basically all kinds of collectors. It’s a fairly small shop, but the collection here is above average, especially with the amount of new records available. There seems to be a correlation between record stores with lots of foot traffic and the amount of ‘new’ records available. COW is a good example of this. I was kind of expecting the selection here to lean heavily used, but it was quite the opposite. There were plenty of used records in the country, soundtrack, and other sections that were relegated to the back corner of the store. But the majority of records in the rock and pop section, which are awarded the prime real estate, are new and still in shrink wrap.
There weren’t any genre stand-outs here, but the punk section was particularly beefy, which I would expect from a shop in Southern California. But it’s far from being a punk-focused record store.
Prices at COW Records
It’s understandable to be wary of prices at shops with locations like COW Records, but have no fear. Everything was priced very reasonably. Used records were priced average to low and the new records were priced slightly lower than many other shops I stopped at in San Diego. If I can find a brand new record for under $20, I count that as a win.
My Thoughts on COW Records
If you are in San Diego and you want to do some record shopping but also don’t want to drive across the city to find a halfway decent shop, then COW Records should be high on your list. Ocean Beach is worth checking out in its own right; the sunsets are as gorgeous as anywhere in Southern California, Hodads is touristy but still great, the farmers market is lively as hell, and COW Records has tons of great stuff.
COW Records reflects the spirit of Ocean Beach and Southern California in a way that every shop I visited in San Diego reflects their own neighborhood. San Diego has changed a ton since I used to go as a kid. But if there’s one place in California that still feels like the old school idealized version of the Golden State, it’s somewhere in San Diego.
Records Purchased
The Offspring – Smash
Address
5040 Newport Ave, San Diego, CA 92107