Full Weekend Menu on Tap for Pop Fans : Music: San Diego performances to include concerts by Garth Brooks, Curtis Mayfield, the Temptations, Four Tops, Karla Bonoff and Ginger Baker.

So many concerts, so little time. That’s the problem facing San Diego pop fans as they prepare for the busiest concert weekend so far this year. Some recommendations:

* Garth Brooks, performing Friday night at the Bacchanal in Kearny Mesa, is the latest country neo-traditionalist to emerge on a major label. The 27-year-old Oklahoman’s debut album came out last year on Capitol Records and promptly won him comparisons to Dwight Yoakam and Ricky Van Shelton.

Brooks was born into a musical family. His mother is the former Colleen Carroll, who in the mid-1950s recorded country for Capitol Records and was a regular on Red Foley’s Ozark Jubilee. His older sister worked with Gus Hardin.

Brooks’ father turned him on to George Jones and Merle Haggard when he was young, but he didn’t begin actively singing and playing guitar until he was in college. Attending Oklahoma State University on a track scholarship, he also performed six nights a week in clubs near the campus.

By 1985, Brooks felt he was ready for the big time, and he moved to Nashville. According to his record company-issued biography, he left the Music City after just 23 hours, “disillusioned but not beaten.” Back home in Oklahoma, Brooks returned to college and spent two years on the road with Santa Fe, a popular regional touring band.

In 1987, Brooks returned to Nashville, this time without the delusions of grandeur he had had on his first visit. He started singing on songwriter demos and was signed by Capitol Records who had heard him perform at a Nashville Entertainment Assn. showcase; his debut album was an immediate favorite with critics and radio stations around the country, and he’s a nominee in the “Best New Artist” category in this year’s annual Country Music Assn. awards presentation.

* Also on Friday, memories of the Apollo Theater in Harlem will be rekindled at the Belly Up Tavern in Solana Beach, with performances by Curtis Mayfield and Sharkskin.

Mayfield is a founding member of the Impressions, the Chicago-based soul group that scored more than a dozen Top 40 hits between 1958 and 1974, including “For Your Precious Love,” “It’s All Right,” “Keep On Pushing,” and “Amen.” Mayfield went solo in 1970 and subsequently cracked the Top 40 five more times on his own--in 1972, “Freddie’s Dead” and “Superfly” both went gold.

Since then, he’s produced, and written for, various other soul acts, including Gladys Knight and the Pips and the Staple Singers. He’s also dabbled in movies, scoring such films as “Claudine,” “Let’s Do It Again,” and “Short Eyes,” a low-budget prison drama in which he also acted.

The show-opening Sharkskins are a San Diego group founded a little more than a year ago by brothers Alfred and Robert Williams. The seven-member soul revue’s repertoire consists primarily of vintage rhythm-and-blues hits like James Brown’s “Please Please Please” and “I Got You (I Feel Good),” Wilson Pickett’s “In the Midnight Hour,” and Bobby Blue Bland’s “Don’t Cry No More.”

* On Saturday, the Temptations and the Four Tops will be appearing at the Starlight Bowl in Balboa Park. Both groups helped define the fabled “Motown sound” of the middle 1960s, when they shook, rattled, and rolled out of Detroit and into the national spotlight with a bevy of soul hits characterized by catchy melodies, sensual rhythms, and passionate vocals.

The Temptations are probably the most successful male vocal group of the 1960s and early ‘70s, with nearly 3 dozen Top 40 hits to their credit--including “My Girl,” “Just My Imagination (Running Away With Me),” and “Papa Was a Rollin’ Stone.” The original group came together in 1962 and was promptly signed by Gordy Records, a Motown subsidiary.

Two years later, they scored their first Top 40 hit with Smokey Robinson’s “The Way You Do the Things You Do,” and they maintained a constant chart presence for more than a decade.

In the meantime, there had been several personnel changes and a shift in direction from romantic pop ballads to the “psychedelic” soul sound popularized by Sly and the Family Stone.

The Temptations last cracked the Top 40 in 1975, with “Glasshouse.” Two years later, the group left Gordy for Atlantic Records and recorded a pair of disco albums. In 1980, Motown wooed them back; since then, the Temptations have continued to make records, but their biggest success has been on the road, plying the oldies circuit.

The same can be said of the Four Tops, who with one exception--1981’s “When She Was My Girl”--have been hitless for 17 years. Between 1964 and 1973, the vocal quartet charted more than 20 times with upbeat love songs featuring Levi Stubbs’ rough-hewn lead vocals. Among them: “I Can’t Help Myself,” “It’s the Same Old Song,” “Reach Out (I’ll Be There),” “Bernadette,” and “Ain’t No Woman (Like the One I’ve Got),” all of which made it into the Top 5.

The four members met at a party in the early 1950s and soon began singing together as the Four Aims. In 1956, they were signed by Chess Records and changed their name to the Four Tops. It wasn’t until eight years, and almost as many labels, later, however, that they scored their first hit, “Baby I Need Your Loving,” which came out on Motown and peaked at No. 11. In 1972, the Four Tops left Motown for ABC/Dunhill, which released their last four hits; they spent the rest of the 1970s playing oldies in supper clubs and Las Vegas lounges.

In 1981, the Four Tops were signed by Casablanca Records and suddenly found themselves back on the charts with “When She Was My Girl.” Buoyed by this success, the group decided to step up its touring schedule and look for bookings in bigger venues. And today, like the Temptations, the Four Tops are once again recording for Motown and playing to packed houses all over the country.

* Also on Saturday, Karla Bonoff will be at the Bacchanal in Kearny Mesa. Andy Warhol once said that everyone will be famous for 15 minutes, and this talented singer-songwriter’s moment came in 1976, when she was signed by Columbia Records after placing three songs on Linda Ronstadt’s best-selling “Hasten Down the Wind” album.

Columbia touted Bonoff as the Next Big Thing, but she wasn’t: Her debut album sold moderately well, but critics mercilessly compared her to Ronstadt and she took two years to assemble a second album. By then, the momentum created by the much-hyped signing was lost, and after cutting a third album for Columbia--1981’s “Wild Heart of the Young,” which featured guest appearances by J.D. Souther, Little Feat’s Bill Payne, and the Eagles’ Joe Walsh, Don Henley and Tim Schmidt--she was unceremoniously dropped by the label.

Since then, Bonoff--whose musical career began in the late 1960s, playing Monday-night hoots at the Troubadour near her family’s West Los Angeles home--has kept a low profile, writing songs and sharing scattered club dates with fellow singer-songwriters like Souther, Bonnie Raitt and John Prine.

In the late ‘80s, she signed with Gold Castle Records and returned to the road as a headliner in support of her comeback album, “New World,” which came out in January, 1989.

* And on Sunday, the Belly Up Tavern in Solana Beach will host Ginger Baker, perhaps the most celebrated rock ‘n’ roll drummer of all time. Baker’s star-studded resume includes stints with seminal British supergroups Cream and Blind Faith; according to the Rolling Stone Encyclopedia of Rock ‘n’ Roll, “His splashy style paved the way for a decade of heavy-metal drum solos.”

As a teen-ager, Baker played with traditional jazz bands in and around his hometown of Lewisham, England. He later played with two of England’s most influential rhythm-and-blues bands, Alexis Korner’s Blues Incorporated (which he joined in 1962 when Charlie Watts left to form the Rolling Stones) and the Graham Bond Organization.

In 1966, Baker teamed up with ex-Manfred Mann bassist Jack Bruce and guitarist Eric Clapton, formerly with the Yardbirds and John Mayall’s Bluesbreakers, to form Cream. Three years later, Baker and Clapton split to form Blind Faith, a short-lived supergroup whose other members were singer Steve Winwood, formerly with the Spencer Davis Group and Traffic, and ex-Family bassist Rick Grech.

In 1970, Baker put together his own group, Ginger Baker’s Air Force, which he used to explore his growing interest in African music. The following year, he moved to Lagos, Nigeria, where he produced and recorded African musicians at his private recording studio. In 1974, Baker reemerged with the Baker-Gurvitz Army, which cut three jazz-rock albums before disbanding in the late 1970s; since then, he’s recorded four albums with space-rock band Hawkwind as well as several solo albums, the most recent of which is 1986’s “Horses and Trees.”