Less Than Jake lead singer/guitarist Chris is proud of his extensive attraction to ’80s metal bands.

“Ratt, WASP, Warrant, Winger, Judas Priest, Iron Maiden, Motley Crue, Vixen, Dio,” he uninhibitedly rattles off the names of some of his favorites — completely unashamed of his fascination with cheesy hair rock. Not the usual taste in music for a guy who fronts a punk-ska band.

And of course … you can’t forget Quiet Riot.

And Quiet Riot is exactly who Less Than Jake decided to tour with over the summer, because, “You gotta, man.”

“We didn’t care. We went out with an old, washed up metal band, and we got off on it and we dug it,” Chris (who along with his bandmates keeps his last name mysteriously unrevealed) explains. “No one else would do that.”

The uniting of the “Cum on Feel the Noize” kings with Less Than Jake drew one of the most unusual audiences ever assembled, all the way down to minor details like the crowd’s hair styles.

“You know what a mullet is?” he asks just before a show in Minneapolis, trying not to let his stuffed-up nose affect the sound of his voice. “It’s the hair cut that’s short in the front but long in the back. That was very prevalent at that show.

“It was a combination of between 30 and 40-year-old dry-wallers with that haircut mixed with 15-year-old punk kids. It was pretty divided, but it was the bringing together of the masses.”

Chris admits to liking Quiet Riot and even owning the band’s first album back in fifth grade. He describes the experience of playing with the band to be “one of the best tours we’ve ever done.”

With the release of “Hello Rockview,” Less Than Jake’s second CD on major label Capitol Records, the band has set out on another tour, this time without Quiet Riot.

Instead, Less Than Jake is headlining a show coming to Ames Monday with veteran punkers All and newcomers the Mad Caddies and Ann Beretta.

Since the group signed its soul away to the corporate devil, band members have been forced to face constant scrutiny and accusations that they are “sellouts.”

“I’ve done nobody an injustice by, whatever, selling out,” Chris says. “If you don’t like us, sorry, don’t listen to us. Call me whatever you want to call me.”

Despite the criticism, Chris says the band never placed a label on itself — it just started jamming in a garage six years ago in Gainesville, Fla., with the intention of playing music and having fun doing it.

The only thing that has changed is the way the band sounds on its albums, Chris says.

“I can hardly listen to our old recordings; I wanna throw up,” he explains. “I like the songs, but the production was just ehhh.”

Signing to a major has given the group a higher budget to create albums that sound cleaner and crisper.

“We have not reinvented the wheel, by any means. Our album is not like the best thing since fuckin’ bread and butter, but I will say that we stand by our own merits,” he says.

Before recording its latest album, Chris and his bandmates had an argument with their label.

Battling Capitol records to avoid compromising their artistic integrity, they defended their punk rock ethic — the same one some fans have accused them of betraying.

“They were just kinda like, ‘You can’t make it too ska. Ska’s going out.’ It’s like, “Fuck you, we’re making a Less Than Jake album.’ I don’t care if the whole fuckin’ thing has upstroke guitar and horns. It’s our fuckin’ album,” Chris says bluntly.

No matter how much Less Than Jake tries to refute sellout charges, there will always be people heckling them.

“With the whole sellout thing — no one realizes — look at these baseball and football players and the kind of money they make. Are they sellouts?

“Come on, they’re playin’ 16 games every other Sunday and they’re making 4.9 billion dollars or whatever they make. Those people are sellouts way more than any musician is to me,” Chris says.

Some of its fans have abandoned them since they switched from the DIY philosophy of minnow, indie Dill Records to the money-driven shark, Capitol records, but overall the crowds haven’t changed.

“Kids are kids,” Chris says, adding that the fan base has expanded as a result of constant touring and wider availability of the band’s albums.

Less Than Jake has always thrived on compilations, and one of the few restrictions the band must conform to is not releasing any Capitol records songs on comps, but this doesn’t bother Chris.

“We just asked for our record to be in the stores at a somewhat decent price and for them to try to get us as much publicity as they can,” he says.

However, Chris is unsatisfied with the publicity his band has received since it joined up with Capitol.

“Our press and everything else is for shit,” he says. “When we pull into towns, it’s like very rare that we get any [press].”

Not that the band has had any trouble drawing an audience for its concerts. At a recent stop in Chicago on Halloween, Less Than Jake performed two shows in one day, and both of them sold out.

On the current tour, the group is headlining over All, a spin off band from the influential ’80s and ’90s punk band the Descendants. In fact, Less Than Jake has been completely comfortable playing with All, despite the fact that it was highly influenced by the Descendants.

“You look at a band like All or the Descendants and they’ve been doin’ the same stuff pretty much for 15 years now, just plugging away,” Chris says.

While Monday’s show may not have a cheesy hair rock band on the bill, Chris says concert-goers can expect “lots of girlfriends on their boyfriend’s shoulders with their fists in the air going madly, crazy as if they were at a Quiet Riot concert back in ’83 in Ames, Iowa.”

Making a career out of music is one thing Less Than Jake has hoped to do in the past few years.

“If you have the opportunity to do your dream — do it. I went to college for fuckin’ four years, man. It’s kinda like the only reason I went to college was to get a degree and hopefully someday make money. I’m gonna take the best job I can get.”

For Chris and Less Than Jake, the best job they could possibly have is playing cheesy metal like Quiet Riot used to do — or maybe just a little punk-ska. Just as long as they feel the “noize.”

Less Than Jake plays with All, the Mad Caddies and Ann Beretta Monday at 7 p.m. at The M-shop. Tickets are $9 for students and $11 general admission.