A 15-year legal settlement between UC Berkeley and the Panoramic Hill Association barred amplified concerts at California Memorial Stadium. Its term has run out, and Cal — chasing football money — says a concert is on the books.

Panoramic Hill rises straight off the east rim of California Memorial Stadium, a steep tangle of wood-frame homes and switchback lanes that straddles the Berkeley–Oakland line. From the upper lots you look down into the bowl at 2227 Piedmont Ave., the 1923 stadium UC Berkeley finished seismically retrofitting in 2012. For fifteen years, the people up here had a piece of paper that kept the loudest events out of it. That paper has run out.

In April 2010, the university and the Panoramic Hill Association settled a lawsuit the neighborhood group had filed in the fall of 2006 — alongside the City of Berkeley and the California Oak Foundation — over the stadium's overhaul. The settlement ran a 15-year term, and among its stipulations were severe limits on capacity, non-football events: no amplified-music concerts, no NFL games, and a cap on large gatherings — nine "capacity" events over a rolling three-year window, no more than four in any year, per Berkeley News' account of the deal at the time. UC Berkeley paid the association roughly $75,000 in attorney fees. ABC7 reported the agreement also boxed most events into an 8 a.m.-to-10 p.m. window.

Those restrictions have lapsed. The SF Standard, in an Aug. 9 piece on how Cal retained quarterback Jaron-Keawe Sagapolutele, reported that the limits "quietly expired last year" — and that the football program noticed. "1990 was the last time we threw a major concert here — Paul McCartney," head coach Tosh Lupoi said at Media Day, per the Standard. He said a concert is "on the books." A university spokesperson told the outlet the school is "excited about the potential to host concerts at California Memorial Stadium"; general manager Ron Rivera described a "proof of concept" event this season and more in the spring. The draw isn't the music — it's revenue that could subsidize the roster.

McCartney's two shows, on March 31 and April 1, 1990, drew more than 118,000 people combined; residents up the hill have long remembered them. Janice Thomas, the association's vice president and a homeowner since 1985, told Yahoo News her house shook during those concerts.

What someone walking Panoramic Hill notices now is what isn't there yet: no date announced, no act named — just a hillside of homes above an empty bowl, and, somewhere on the books, a show.