1-2-3-4 Go! Records

Most record shops sell somebody else's music. This one also releases it. 1-2-3-4 Go! Records started as a label in Seattle in 2001, before the storefront existed at all — the shop came later, once owner Steve Stevenson had a catalog worth standing behind in person.

A label that grew a shop, not the other way around

Stevenson opened the physical store in Temescal in 2008, in a small space later taken over by Subrosa Coffee. It didn't fit — East Bay Express's 2011 profile has him outgrowing that first location within a year and moving to a bigger storefront on the same stretch of 40th Street, between Webster and Shafter.

A few years after that, the building's owner offered him the vacant space across the street to build out as a combined shop annex and all-ages venue — Oakland had a real shortage of rooms where under-21 kids could see a band, and Stevenson took the lease.

The label side never stopped running alongside the retail. Discogs lists the imprint's catalog going back to that 2001 Seattle start, and its roster has included Shannon and the Clams, Nobunny, the Cute Lepers, and the Sandwitches. In 2024 it put out Pinhead Gunpowder's first new material since 2008 — a band on hiatus for sixteen years, back on a label run out of the same shop that sells its records over the counter.

What's actually on the shelves

The stock skews punk, garage, and hardcore, but the shop's own site describes itself plainly as "Record Store, Online Mail Order and Label" — new and used vinyl, rare cassettes, and CDs, with consignments taken daily from local and touring bands. Used inventory goes up on the website at 6 a.m. Pacific every Monday, per the shop's own listing.

The Oakland store is also the surviving location — a Valencia Street outpost the label opened in San Francisco in 2016 has since closed, per Yelp's listing for that address, leaving 40th Street as the only storefront.

Recent Yelp reviews split between people happy with fast mail-order shipping and a December 2025 reviewer who found the bins disorganized and the counter service slow — one person's account, not a verdict. It hasn't dented the shop's standing with the wider record-collecting press: the Goldmine podcast gave it a strong write-up in its Record Store Recon series.

When to actually go

The shop is at 420 40th St #5, a few blocks from MacArthur BART, open noon to 7 p.m. on weekdays and 11 a.m. to 7 p.m. on weekends, per its own listed hours — closed only for Thanksgiving and Christmas. Between 8 a.m. and noon it's open by appointment only, so a morning walk-in won't get you through the door.

It's a small room, and the stock is dense rather than spacious — one late-2025 reviewer's complaint was specifically that the bins are hard to navigate. Browsing means flipping, not scanning. The back-room stage runs all-ages shows when a band's routed through, which changes the room completely on those nights; the shop's own site and Instagram are where those dates get posted.

The next confirmed date worth building a trip around is Record Store Day, officially set for April 17, 2027 — the third Saturday of that April, per Record Store Day's own release calendar. 1-2-3-4 Go! runs the day the way most independent shops do: exclusive pressings in limited runs, opening hours pushed earlier, and whatever's left over posted to the shop's online store the next morning.

If the trip needs a second stop, Oakland's newer bar crop is a few minutes away.